Traditional wisdom is that voice picking should follow along after a strategic WMS upgrade.  But that’s only because traditional voice solutions suffered from directly embedded “API-based” interfaces, creating a deadly embrace with the WMS code itself – so the only way to even get voice picking was to do a WMS upgrade – and then further modifications were almost always required.

In fact, the desire to reap the benefits of voice is sometimes the catalyst for a WMS upgrade – but what if you could get those benefits while avoiding the upgrade – or use the savings produced from voice picking to pay for the upgrade?

Anyone who has been through a WMS upgrade knows that it is often (but not always) an expensive and time-consuming project that tends to put other things on hold.  Many enterprises delay these upgrades as long as possible so that costs are conserved and potential disruption minimized.  But this has the effect of preventing the company from taking advantage of new capabilities offered by the WMS – the operation becomes inflexible.

This has led to an interesting marketplace reality, where users of the tier 1 WMS packages are less likely to be getting the benefits of voice picking than enterprises with home grown or legacy WMS products.

This situation is beginning to change, for several reasons.  Major WMS players have invested in modernizing their product architectures, often creating new, service-oriented methods of interacting with third party products.  We at Voxware have become the first to take advantage of these efforts, and the results have been remarkable.

By employing the concept of “loosely-coupled interfaces,” we’ve developed WMS Adapters that enable our customers to deploy voice picking solutions without requiring intrusive modifications on the WMS side.  Loosely-coupled interfaces are based on data – messages that are mapped and sent between systems.  This enables the two products to communicate and cooperate, yet evolve independently of each other.  So, no more “deadly embrace,” and no requirement to have two vendors involved every time you want to make a change.

The result is far greater flexibility and control for enterprises using voice picking.  Often, improvements to the voice picking process can be made without impacting the WMS.  Likewise, the WMS can be upgraded without impacting the voice system.  This gives maximum agility to meet changing business requirements – and with the savings realized from voice picking, other initiatives can be funded.