Every WMS vendor will quote you a price for the software. What decides whether you can live with the system is the set of expectations that come attached to it, and those are not on the quote.
Kevin Lawton pushed me on the market itself for episode 524 of The New Warehouse, in September 2024. Established vendors against the newer entrants, and what a smaller operation should make of either. It's the only one of these conversations where I spent the time on the shape of the vendor landscape rather than the shape of the buyer.
Every quote block below is me, on the episode, condensed for reading.
It's Easier to Go Up Market Than Back Down
You get a subset that get a lot of limelight. The analysts out there highlight certain ones for a bunch of different reasons. I could go in and tear that down for a bit and get very opinionated, but effectively they have a leg up where the smaller ones don't. They all come with, I wouldn't say baggage, but very big expectations that are not always called out.
It's like buying a very fancy car and you have all the maintenance that comes with it. It could potentially be too much for you long-term when you factor in all the other investments you have to do, versus something a little more practical to start with.
Those expectations have a source, and it's a design decision rather than a sales tactic:
Especially when you get into the bigger vendors that are almost like a Swiss army knife. They do so many things, they cater to so many industries, and no matter what you do there, you can't hide all that complexity. It's easier to go up market than it is to go back down market, because you've made some design choices there.
A system built to serve operations far larger than yours arrives carrying their assumptions. Somebody has to configure those assumptions away before your building can use it, and that somebody bills by the hour.
The maintenance on the fancy car is the professional services line, and it exists because the software was designed for a bigger building than the one you have.
None of which makes the well-known systems wrong. It makes the shortlist a question about fit rather than reputation, which is why we don't publish rankings and why the best WMS for a mid-sized operation has no single answer.
Betting on a Vendor That's Still Being Built
Kevin asked whether a buyer should be wary of the newer entrants. The first test is survival:
There's risk involved. You need to understand how capitalized they are. There's ones that are venture backed, and there's some out there that are bootstrapping based on realistically pleasing customers and growing based on revenue.
Another one that probably doesn't get as much attention as it should is the ability to execute. And that's not necessarily just focused on the startups. There are some that are well established that don't necessarily have well-oiled game plans and processes in place.
Those are separate questions, and buyers tend to collapse them. Product quality is visible in a demo. Whether a vendor can put that product into a building on a schedule shows up nowhere in the sales process, and it's the half that determines what the year after signing feels like.
Capitalization tells you whether the vendor survives. A repeatable implementation practice tells you whether your project does, and those two things are independent of each other and of how old the company is.
The second test is whether the product has a reason to exist:
I try to make sure I'm always talking to the founders, to figure out what the vision is. You don't want to go out and build yet another WMS, because there's a bunch out there. Can you bring some secret sauce that makes sense for the market in your particular niche?
And the honest part, which is that somebody has to go first:
That's almost like a chicken and egg problem, because some folks need to bet on these ones early on to be able to get some of those accolades, so others will follow suit.
Early adoption buys real influence over a roadmap. It also means the reference calls you'd want to make don't exist yet, so the reference check has to change shape rather than be skipped.
The Process Flows You Don't Have
Kevin asked for one tip. This was it:
No matter where you are at, there's tribal knowledge in your business. Focus on capturing that. I advocate for visual process flows, because they're relatable to everybody, leadership down to the people on the floor working. They can look at that and quickly grasp what's going on.
Taking the time to map all that out before you talk to vendors will give you so much more mileage. Vendors can give you better advice and advocate for certain solutions. You can weigh different vendors against each other based on how they would approach something, because you have the meat that most customers don't really have.
A documented process flow turns a demo into a comparison. Without one, every vendor answers a slightly different question, and there's no basis for preferring one answer to another beyond how the hour felt.
The mapping gets done regardless. The only question is when, and at what rate:
If they have any process flows at all, they're usually old and outdated. They're inconsistently put together, and then you do a lot of this work during design after you buy. And that's where the costs weren't necessarily baked in. There was assumptions around that being done already.
That's also the case against running an RFP as the first step. An RFP written before the flows exist asks vendors to respond to requirements nobody has verified.
The Cutoff Conversation
You see a lot of finger pointing no matter the size of the business. I use the example a lot with sales. They're talking to customers, and you get a seemingly small change late in the game, and there's a lot of ramifications for the folks on the floor. Of course, it's us versus them at that point.
If you can get them talking, you can work backwards and find out, is there a cutoff time that works for everybody. Then they can talk to the customer and say, we can make that change by a certain part of the day. If not, it's next day. You give people explicit choices.
The reason this belongs in a system conversation rather than a management one is what a WMS does to informal accommodation. Today a late change is somebody walking to the floor and asking. Once the system is directing the work, the same favor means pulling back a released wave, reversing transactions and re-planning the labor around it.
A late change that used to cost a conversation costs a transaction reversal once the system directs the work, so the guardrails have to be negotiated before the system starts enforcing them.
Who Pays for the Favor
The reversal isn't the expensive part, and it isn't the interesting part either. Pull one order back off a trailer to accommodate a change and you haven't only touched that customer. Everything else staged on that trailer moves with it. Those orders ship later, somebody downstream absorbs the delay, and nobody traces any of it back to the phone call that started it.
I call that subsidized behavior. The accommodation looks free to the person granting it, because the cost lands somewhere they can't see and gets paid in small increments by people who had no say in the decision and mostly never learn it happened.
Subsidized behavior is an accommodation that appears free because its cost is paid by people who weren't part of the decision. A guardrail doesn't remove that cost. It puts the cost in front of whoever is choosing to spend it.
Left alone, it produces the pattern where every team is doing its job correctly and the operation still underperforms. Each accommodation was defensible on its own. None of them was priced.
What's Changed Since September 2024
Right now we do something called clarity first, and it's a 12 week program. A lot of the feedback I've gotten through past prospects is that it takes too long and it's too expensive. So we're piloting breaking that down into clarity in a week, effectively, or less than two weeks.
The pilot became the product. It's the System Fit Sprint now, with deliverables landing two weeks after the final onsite, a published price and a published scope. The done-with-you model I mention on the episode is gone.
The audience moved too. On this episode I describe the work as helping midsize businesses pursue their first WMS, and that framing has been retired. It's first or next now, and the qualifier is complexity: client SLAs, retailer chargebacks, lot and expiry traceability, B2B and B2C shipping out of the same building.
The boundary moved from how many systems you've owned to how much of your operation runs on rules you don't set.
