Alternatives to replacing your warehouse management system

Why the question comes up

It usually starts with a report the WMS can't give you. The WMS gets the blame, when most of what's missing was never its job: the paid hours sit in the clocking system, some of the work never reaches it as a task and the rules for your contracts live somewhere else.

The question worth asking first is what you're missing and which route closes that gap soonest, at the least risk.

Why doesn't my WMS give me the labour reporting I need?

1. Get more from the WMS you have

This covers upgrading to the current release, paying the vendor to configure new reports and adding its own labour or analytics module. It also covers waiting for the AI the platform has on its roadmap.

The cost is vendor services days, an upgrade project or a module licence. Waiting is free until the feature arrives, then priced however the vendor chooses.

What it fixes is whatever that vendor ships, inside that one system, with support from the people who built it.

What it leaves is anything held outside the WMS, such as the clocking records, the agency timesheets and each client's contract. The timetable is the vendor's rather than yours.

2. Add a labour management system

A labour management system, or LMS, sits alongside the WMS and measures each task against an engineered standard: the time it should take on that route with that equipment.

The cost is a licence and the work to connect it to the WMS and the clocking system. On top of that comes a project to build an engineered standard for every task, then keep each one current as the layout and the work change. It's a long piece of work before the first figure is trusted.

What it fixes is measuring people against a standard you trust, which is the base for most incentive schemes.

What it leaves is most of the problem. A standard measures people doing the work the way it's set up today, so it can't tell you the stock is in the wrong place, the pick lists bunch people together or the shift is slow to start. That's usually where the time goes.

A distribution warehouse of around 600 people went looking for a labour management system in 2026 and chose us instead, on the promise of finding the savings in its own data rather than measuring its people against a standard. Regrouping the pick lists alone lifted output 12.5 per cent, with nobody asked to work harder. On a 7.5-hour shift, that's nearly an hour's extra work from the same team.

3. Build your own reporting on top

Your own analysts pull the data from each system into a data warehouse and build reports in a tool such as Power BI or Tableau.

The tools are cheap and the people aren't. The cost is the time to build it, then the upkeep every time a system underneath changes.

What it fixes is exactly the reports you design, owned by you, joining whichever systems you choose.

What it leaves is knowing which questions matter on a warehouse floor and how to measure people fairly, which is harder than the data work. It also leans on the people who built it, so it's exposed when one of them moves on.

4. Add a layer that reads across the systems you run

Decision support sits on top of the WMS and the other systems, standardises and checks what they record, then shows what needs attention in the warehouse today. Nothing underneath is replaced. It's the route Fettle is built for and the one we'd take first.

The cost is a subscription, usually per operator, plus a piece of set-up work in the first months.

What it fixes is the gaps between systems, including the causes that sit in how the work is set up, seen without a go-live. Around 80 per cent of the value we've found early on was already inside the operation as it ran, so nothing had to be rebuilt to reach it. What's built stays in place if you change the WMS later.

What it leaves is the running of the warehouse, which is still the WMS's job. If the WMS can't do that job, a layer on top won't change it. The numbers also only pay if somebody acts on them, so the first months need time from your supervisors and managers.

With Fettle, you'll see your first numbers within two weeks. Operational views configured to your warehouse follow by week four. It's charged per tracked operator, on the operators actually working, which comes to under one per cent of what an operator costs you, plus that set-up work.

What a replacement costs and when it's still right

A new WMS is a licence plus the professional services to put it in, which often cost more than the licence itself. Counting the months of the project, the risk of the go-live and the management time it takes, it's one of the largest bills a warehouse can take on.

It also rarely reaches the problems that started it. A new WMS records the same kind of work in a new format, while the lost time sits in how the work is set up rather than in the system recording it.

Replacement still earns its cost in three cases:

1. The WMS is out of support.
2. It can't run a process the business now depends on, such as new automation or a new channel.
3. Keeping it running costs more each year than moving would.

Short of those, be sure what a replacement would fix before starting one. Our founder spent twenty-eight years as an IT Director living with the systems he bought. The gaps in a new system tended to show only after the long, expensive part was over, once the business had carried the risk of the go-live and still didn't have quite the fit it needed.

What the gap costs while you decide

Whichever route you take, the paid hours that don't reach the work keep costing money until something closes the gap. Two warehouses we've worked in measured utilisation at 65 per cent once the off-system work was counted, against a realistic 85 to 90 per cent. The 20 to 25 points between them cost a fifth to a quarter of the labour bill.

Take a warehouse with 400 operators, each costing £31,000 a year with the employer's costs included. The labour bill is £12.4m a year, so the gap is worth £2.48m to £3.1m a year: more than £200,000 for every month it stays open.

Work out what the gap costs in your warehouse

Which one fits