top of page

Question answered in Quora - Supply Chain: A typical company will have some form of EDI, an accounti

There are many problems that will occur,

The most important you will no the able to scale your company. One of the main reasons behind putting these systems and automating everything is to handle large volumes, if you cannot integrate them properly it defeats the purpose. So naturally you will have to have manual steps to keep all these in synch, which will be every expensive and error prone. So it is a bad idea, if it is temporary situation it is probably okay, but in the long run you want to integrate all these.

Here are some of the problems I have seen consistently occur

1 - The orders will not hit the Warehouse Management System, sometimes nobody will even know that the orders have not made it to the Warehouse and everyone realizes only when the customer calls to check on the order

2 - You need to have very thorough reporting in place just to cross check everything against all the three systems, it is painful. You will end up paying employees to do hard and painful work to jeep these three systems in synch

3 - The money is better spent by integrating these systems, in the long run, or least you could integrate the Accounting and the WMS first then do the EDI as Phase II.

Also check out my book Puga Sankara's Supply Chain Blog - that is a must read before spending Hundreds & Thousands of $$$ on your MBA or Masters Degree to get the best ROI or before starting your Entrepreneurial journey.


ABOUT THE AUTHOR 

Puga Sankara is the co-founder of Smart Gladiator LLC. Smart Gladiator designs, builds, and delivers market-leading mobile technology consisting of Smart Gladiator Wearable Scanguns, Tablets, Mobile Tech & Apps for retailers, distributors, and 3PL service providers. So far, Smart Gladiator Wearables have been used to ship, receive, and scan more than 100 million boxes. Users love them for the lightweight, easy-to-use soft overlay keyboard, texting&video chatting ability, data collection ability etc. Puga is a supply chain technology professional with more than 17 years of experience in deploying capabilities in the logistics and supply chain domain. His prior roles involved managing complicated mission-critical programs driving revenue numbers, rolling out a multitude of capabilities involving more than a dozen systems, and managing a team of 30 to 50 personnel across multiple disciplines and departments in large corporations such as Hewlett Packard. He has deployed WMS for more than 30 distribution centers in his role as a senior manager with Manhattan Associates. He has also performed process analysis walk-throughs for more than 50 distribution centers for WMS process design and performance analysis review, optimizing processes for better productivity and visibility through the supply chain. Size of these DCs varied from 150,000 to 1.2 million SQFT. Puga Sankara has an MBA from Georgia Tech. He can be reached at puga@smartgladiator.com or visit the company at www.smartgladiator.com. Also follow him at www.pugasankara.com

bottom of page