Implementation of Blue Yonder WMS

In the summer of 2020, Starware employees participated in the kick-off of a new Blue Yonder implementation. The customer is a significant player in the 3rd party logistics (3PL) market and plans to roll out Blue Yonder WMS to all of its sites in the region. The end customer of our 3PL customer is active in the technology vertical.

The customer’s main goal is to globally implement an industry-leading warehouse management system, namely Blue Yonder. Our 3PL customer focuses on increasing distribution center efficiency, labor productivity, and agility to cope with today’s market challenges.

Next to this, Blue Yonder Warehouse Management System has proven over and over to reduce distribution cost and inventory levels, all leading to bottom-line gains for the end customer. Those results and goals are concluded from a detailed business case leading up to this global project.

The first implementation was planned for a site in The Netherlands. Our Starware team attended digitally (due to reasons we all know) and got things rolling.

THE TEAM

The Starware implementation team consisted of three members. Namely: a project manager, a functional consultant, and a technical consultant.

Within Starware, we feel such a team should be able to do the job for small to medium-sized projects. In large projects, requirements can vary widely. That’s why we always sit down with the customer to check the best project team fit.

IMPLEMENTATION APPROACH

Firstly, our Starware team sat down with the 3PL’er and the end customer. Then we drafted up a project plan with associated effort. Our team members quickly engaged from the start. This way, we made sure we drafted a plan that was reachable for all parties.

We always work with the customer to decide which project methodology suits the implementation best (Agile, Waterfall, hybrid, etc.). The methodology choice varies depending on the requirements of the project.

PHASES

After careful consideration with all parties, we decided to follow the classic waterfall methodology. It follows the following stages (1) design, (2) build, (3) test, and (4) deploy phase.

Design

The experience gathered over many years of implementations is always very welcome and helpful when designing new solutions.

Starware has engaged right from the start with the 3PL’er and the end customer to work out a design that fits all business requirements. Typically, we take 3-5 weeks for this process. Less than three weeks leave no room for documentation, while longer than five weeks risks that you go through too much detail at the start.
Together with all parties, we make sure the ideas turn into real-life solutions!

Build and gap analysis

In this part of the implementation, Starware colleagues worked with the 3PL’er to give them all the configuration insights on the Blue Yonder Warehouse Management System. The central idea in this phase is (for the Starware team) to provide on-the-job training to the 3PL’er, so they can slowly take over this role themselves.

Often configuration goes way much deeper than just turning on/off flags in the system. You need to see the whole picture of the implementation as much as you need to be fully aware of the design from inbound to outbound with its associated gaps.

Alongside the configuration -led by our functional consultant-, our technical consultant started to work out the details for the gaps. The design (phase 1) provided this person a list of gaps with associated and required functionality. At this time, it is his/her job to dive into the technical details of the gaps and draft specs for the developer.

Once all the specs are drafted and signed off by all parties, we will also ensure the development of these changes is delivered in line with the configuration and ready to be tested in the next phase.

Test – auditing and testing

At this stage, our customer is very acquittanced with the Blue Yonder Warehouse Management system. It is also the moment that the identified gaps have been developed and unit tested, which means that the test teams can kick off their work.

For this project, we ensured that the key/end-users were involved right from the start of testing. This way, we could add test capacity. And more importantly: this process served as the perfect training process for the team, and that we had very early guidance and feedback from the warehouse operation teams.

Often, we see in implementations a gap between the design team and the requirements from the blue-collar workers in the warehouse. By involving them right from the start of testing, they were engaged and provided valuable feedback, all leading up to a successful deployment phase.

Deploy

At Starware, we always feel this is the most exciting phase since all the project work is coming together. This (the deploy phase) is when we deploy all configurations and developments to the final production systems.

It is also the point that the first golden transactions are taking place to make sure all code is deployed correctly (and nothing is forgotten). Once the golden transactions are passed and the teams give the green light, the big bang go-live could take place!

Obviously, our Starware team is there at any time to support a successful go-live at any cost.

GET IN TOUCH

If you feel inspired by the above story or would like to learn more about how we are implementing Blue Yonder Warehouse Management Solution, please let us know!

We will be writing more and more details about our implementations, so please also be on the lookout for further updates.