The goal of New Dawn Supply Chain is to produce WES software that’s intuitive to use, scales with your business, and adapts to the ever changing demands of today’s fulfillment operations. This allows you to easily add additional automation when you need it to meet tomorrow’s challenges with today’s software.
The acronym WES stands for Warehouse Execution System. In order to understand what that means, we need to look at Warehouse Management Systems (WMS), Warehouse Control Systems (WCS), and how inventory is managed an automated environment.
For further reading, DC Velocity has a great article about the differences between WES, WCS, and WMS here.
Warehouse Management System
WMS manages your inventory, from receiving to order management to shipment. WMS provides visibility to the inventory within a fulfillment center and structures what needs to happen with it.
Warehouse Control System
An automated warehouse has many interconnected sub systems such as: sortation, palletizing, pick to light, print and apply, etc. WCS provides single port connectivity to the higher level systems such as the WMS and communicates with the control layer resident in each of the sub systems.
Warehouse Execution System
As automation systems became more sophisticated, a new generation of WCS software was needed to support the greater functionality of advanced systems. The term WES was created to define and differentiate this newer software from older, less advanced WCS software. A WES includes features typically found in a WMS, so inventory can be more actively managed to ultimately improve task processing performance within the facility. The timeliness and responsiveness of a single system allocating inventory and directing the warehouse automation to act upon it significantly improves the efficiency of the overall system. WES is the software link between the WMS and the Material Handling Equipment (MHE). With controlled access to the warehouse inventory and workers, along with efficient and orchestrated control of the MHE, the ability to adapt to ever changing facility conditions is achievable.
A good modern WES can help coordinate and control functions that would ordinarily require WCS, such as picking system management, packing system management, and sortation. Further, a good modern WES can help on the WMS side as well, coordinating and controlling functions such as labor management, shipping management, and SKU movement around the warehouse.
