Somebody who assesses whether you need a warehouse management system, and who does not sell one, has exactly one answer that costs them money to give. It's the answer worth paying for.
Nathan Chaney had me on episode 32 of the Supply Chaney Podcast in March 2025, and he asked the question directly enough that I had to answer it. What follows is that answer, the business case that goes with it, and the story of an assessment that went badly.
Every quote block below is me, on the episode, condensed for reading.
Very Likely to Tell You Not Yet
Someone will say, well, you're never going to say no. You have this vested interest in it. I'm like, well, I don't know if that's true, but I'm very likely to tell you not yet.
The suspicion is reasonable and worth answering rather than deflecting. The reason the answer can be no is that the assessment is asking more than one question:
It's a readiness assessment. It answers three fundamental questions. Do you need a WMS? Are you ready for one? And then what should you be looking for in them?
Three questions, and only the third is about vendors. A selection process that opens with the third question has quietly assumed the answers to the first two.
The first question often resolves back into software you already own:
They've already bought an ERP, they deployed it, but are they fully leveraging it? There are modules that will do some semblance of warehouse management that'll get you very far. If you have it and you're not using it, let's look at that to give you some kind of mileage.
That's a different conversation from when an operation genuinely needs one, and worth having in that order.
Cost of Inaction Instead of ROI
One of the ways I like to do that is this concept of cost of inaction. Instead of ROI, where it's all this fuzzy hypothetical stuff out there, like we can do all these great things afterwards, it's more of, if we don't move, what is the real cost to our business?
Are we okay with that? Is that a small enough limitation that we can still stick with the not yet answer? Or is there something very big there that if we don't move, it's going to hobble us in the future?
A return projection is a claim about an operation nobody has run yet, assembled from vendor benchmarks and optimistic assumptions about adoption. Cost of inaction is a claim about the operation you are running today, which means the numbers are already sitting in your own systems.
A return projection describes an operation you haven't run. The cost of inaction describes the one you're running now, and only one of those two can be checked against something.
It also has the advantage of producing a defensible no. If the cost of standing still is small, standing still is the right call, and the exercise has told you something worth knowing about what the current arrangement is actually costing.
The Person Who Can't Take Vacation
When you bring somebody in and you don't have systems in place, it takes them a long time to unpack and discover that tribal knowledge, where someone has been there for 10 years and just knows it like the back of their hand. But the day they're out, your productivity goes way down. Or they're pressured not to take vacation, because what do you do when they're not here?
The readiness question that follows from that is uncomfortably specific, and it's the one I ask:
Does anybody besides Jack know how to determine where you put this inventory, or how you carve up work on any given day? If the answer is no, then we need to figure out what the decision criteria are that he's using today, and where they can live. So tomorrow the system's doing it for you, doing it consistently every single time. Jack can take a day off. Jack maybe gets promoted to some other function in the warehouse, and he's not hamstrung to this forever.
Undocumented decision criteria turn one person into infrastructure. It shows up as a productivity cliff when they leave, and long before that as somebody who has quietly stopped taking vacation.
Codifying those criteria is usually described as a systems benefit, and it is one. It's also the thing that lets the person who has been carrying the operation in their head do something else, which tends to matter more to them than it does to the business case. Where it doesn't happen, the dependency compounds, and the operation gets harder to scale for reasons that never appear on an org chart.
A Hundred Pages of Observation
Nathan asked about getting more mileage out of what you already have before spending. I had a story for it:
I worked with a distributor last year. They had worked with a big advisory firm, done this assessment, a hundred page document. And they used that as their gospel for evaluating vendors. And they selected one.
When we went back and were going through requirements, they were frustrated with the vendor, because they didn't support the use cases like they thought they did. And they're like, but it's in our document. Just as an example, lot management. Literally there was a paragraph on it. No teeth, no real requirements. Just this general concept, and they were trusting the advisory firm that the vendor would understand what they meant. When we got in there and really started asking questions, it was clear it did not even come close.
A requirement with no teeth reads as coverage and behaves as a gap. The document said lot management. It never said what the system had to do about a lot, and the vendor answered the question the document actually asked.
That's the same failure described from the vendor's side of the table in what to know before you buy: every system in the category supports lot management, and the word covers wildly different things.
The exit wasn't available either:
First was, can we get out of the contract? And of course they couldn't. The WMS contract was ironclad. They were bought in for three years regardless of whether they used it.
Then, a year in, they arrived at the question that should have come first, which was whether they were using their ERP enough. My read on the document they paid for:
It's a hundred pages, but it's all basic observation. There's no analysis in there. There's no real recommendations. I'm never going to say working with an advisory firm isn't a good idea. What I would say is if you're working with a really big one and you're a midsize business, your mileage is not going to get very far. Their expertise is at a different level, and they assume you're already mature.
The terms you sign are the last place a weak assessment can still be caught, and by far the most expensive place to catch it.
Where the Extra Design Time Comes From
It's like a ripple effect. You spend more time upfront in design to get all these things answered that you thought were there. And then something else has to give, unless you can figure out, can I get more time or more budget. A lot of times that means testing and training get railroaded, and then your risk goes way up.
Worth following that all the way through, because it explains why unreadiness shows up as a go-live problem rather than a design problem. A project with a fixed date and a fixed budget has one flexible variable, which is the work that hasn't started yet. Testing and training are last on every plan.
Design overruns rarely extend a project. They compress whatever sits at the end of it, which is how a schedule problem arrives disguised as a training problem on day one.
The compression is visible months before go-live if anyone is watching for it, which is most of what early warning in these projects looks like.
What's Changed Since March 2025
With Fullstride, I really don't work with upgrading. It's much more oriented around moving from ERP only to the first warehouse management system, and all the maturity that goes along with getting there successfully.
That line is retired. The work covers a first system or a next one, and the qualifier is the complexity of the operation rather than its purchase history. Clarity First, which I describe on this episode as a readiness assessment, is the System Fit Sprint now, with deliverables landing two weeks after the final onsite and a price and scope published on the site.
Not yet was something I said on instinct in 2025. It's a published disqualification now, which is a considerably harder thing to walk back with a signed proposal sitting in front of you.
