Five WMS for growing companies to put on their vendor shortlist

Congratulations on your growth and those growing pains. They always seem to happen when you make the jump from a small to a mid-sized or large business, and solving them is especially important when it comes to the face you show your partners and customers.

You can avoid some of these concerns by creating shortlists as you grow, starting to understand which WMS vendors can help you today and stay with you as you grow again. For warehouse management platforms, creating that partner list before you need it can save you significant headaches.

Here are a few companies you may want to consider researching if you’re approaching a growth stage that would mandate a new WMS.

For a cost-effective solution: 3PL Warehouse Manager

Growing companies can mean and need many different things, so the 3PL Warehouse Manager from 3PL Central earns a spot in your consideration list for its simple and effective abilities to help you respond to your customer’s needs, provide turnkey offerings, and manage multiple customers across a variety of billing schedules and other needs.

It tends to be one of the more intuitive and affordable WMS systems that is designed to scale across multiple warehouses and with a variety of new customers. It made its mark by providing a significant number of upgrades over the past 10 years, largely free to their users.

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Companies have used the 3PL Central system to scale from small shops to large enterprises, and you’ll have plenty of modules and integrations to assist with that growth.

http://3plcentral.com/

For companies that need to integrate: Cin7

Growing companies always end up using a wide array of software because of their development and that of their partners. Cin7 is a smart warehouse and inventory management platform to remember because it has a wide array of integration options, plus it supports data output so you can integrate with a 3PL that requires EDI.

As you move to global sales, Cin7 can support that as well and has a significant presence around the globe. For the most part, it plays well with complex systems and managing inventory across multifaceted sites. Users have reported some customization work disrupting existing integrations, but they also note that the Cin7 team was quick to help with a fix.

The downsides that keep others on your short list are user reports of service interruptions and a few sticky UI points, such as creating new customer names without a verification if you improperly key in a supplier or customer name.

https://www.cin7.com/

For a B2B focus: TradeGecko

If your business is in the B2B space, TradeGecko offers one of the better multi-warehouse platforms for managing orders and pricing, maintaining inventory, and integrating your most-needed software and modules.

Channel management and category customization help for both B2B wholesalers and retailers, with a focus on maintaining brand consistency and selling to anywhere in the world. A big benefit is that the service looks nice and is fairly easy to pick up, and this extends to its capabilities such as automatically syncing product images and information from the TradeGecko platform to channels like Shopify.

Customers give it high marks for service and functionality, especially in the B2B realm.

https://www.tradegecko.com/

For enhanced efficiency: SkuVault

The cloud-based SkuVault is popular growth tools because it packs a lot of inventory punch in its WMS, plus it says that clients, on average, reduce fulfillment times by 87%. Customers also note that it rarely has any downtime, offers a good feature set of the price, and makes updates based on what the community says it needs.

One of its more compelling functionalities is the ability to set advanced buffers on a per-SKU or per-marketplace level, making it easy to push to marketplaces right when a business needs it. As you grow and add new distribution channels, this automated rule setting can ease the burden of learning new systems for those marketplaces.

And the chief reason it lands on the list is that functionality is paired with very active customer service. The SkuVault team responds to user and community problems, plus has been actively engaging with customers leaving positive and negative reviews on a rapid-fire basis since at least early 2015.

http://www.skuvault.com

For those wanting something a bit more powerful: NetSuite WMS

When your business reaches a higher order of magnitude in growth, it’s probably time to step up to something like NetSuite WMS. While it can have a high learning curve for those new to WMS and ERP solutions, it quickly becomes one of the strongest platforms for practiced professionals.

Reporting in NetSuite WMS is second to none, and it has some of the most robust cloud features, controls, and workflows around. The platform is just one part of a much larger suite of applications, and you can integrate new modules fairly easily as you grow.

NetSuite has been a player in cloud services since 1998 with some of the first enterprise cloud applications. It was purchased by Oracle at the end of 2016 and is likely going to continue to see significant feature support and growth.

http://www.netsuite.com

If you’ve got the upward trajectory and the budget, it’s hard to go wrong with the NetSuite WMS.