From SCDigest's On-Target E-Magazine
Nov. 2, 2011
Supply Chain News: Innovative App Store Concept for WMS Gaining Early Traction
HighJump Has Delivered 18 Apps, more on the Way; Speeding the Development Cycle; Users Already Contributing New Apps for Others to Use
SCDigest Editorial Staff
At its 2010 user conference, supply chain execution software vendor HighJump Software announced an innovative approach to software enhancements with an product it called the App Station, designed to address niche or special functionality by downloading specific "apps" that could be easily added to its Warehouse Management System and likely someday other modules, rather than waiting for future version releases or company-specific customizations to the existing code.
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SCDigest Says: |
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| One potential and even breakthrough promise of the App Station approach was that HighJump customers themselves might be willing to submit apps they had developed using the Advantage Architect tool for use by other companies through the App Station. |
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What Do You Say?
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A year later, HighJump reports steady progress in both app development and user acceptance.
The App Station model, intentionally a derivative of the app store concept for smart phones and tablet PCs, is meant to provide usually relatively simple enhancements to HighJump core applications, focused right now on WMS.
The HighJump App Station features pieces of functionality that can be downloaded and added to the appropriate module in HighJump's suite that a customer already has installed.
The problem HighJump was trying to solve is in large part the issue of what new functionality to include in the base system. Often, there are requirements specific to a given vertical industry or logistics process model that are relevant to only a small set of customers. While those companies would naturally like to see the capability put into the base product, over time these little enhancement can "junk up" or bloat the system with a lot of features and code very few customers use.
Additionally, new functional requirements may pop up in the middle of a product release cycle, or just miss the inevitable cut in terms of what will be added to the next release of the product.
Of course, customers can make modifications to their own system to achieve this functionality, in HJighJump's case a process facilitated by its Advantage Architect tool, which allows customers or consultants to create their own mods without having to deal at the real code level. Nevertheless, those modifications take time, cost money, and require a level of expertise.
The App Store approach addresses these problems by offering a portfolio of pieces of new functionality that HighJump customers on a current maintenance contract can download and install for free. SCDigest got a chance earlier this year (See Cool New Product of the Month for May, 2011) to see how the process works, which showed how companies can literally download and install a new app in 20 minutes or so. When coming from the App Station, a downloaded app is fully supported and documented by HighJump.
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The key questions were: (1) Would these apps really work as intended? and (2) Would HighJump stay committed to the model through the usual growing pains for any new initiative, and the ever present demand on resources and where to best allocate them all software companies face?