The Decisive Technology
Steady and firm for 8 years, Reko team is growing for the first time. Reko is built on top level expertise from day one. In one hand, we’re conservative on the cost and quality of training up new resources to the level we expect, on the other hand, it’s a pity to waste the in-depth knowledge of our talents. With the support of our colleagues, partners, and our clients. We think it’s time to bring new blood to the team. Tune on for the new chapter of Reko!
April 25th, 2021, Reko CICD V2021.1.0.0 for BlueYonder WMS is officially released.
Here, are some key improvements you might be interested.
April 6th, 5 years ago today, Reko started its journey reluctantly after JDA Shanghai ODC where we spent 12 years , many members’ entire career, in RedPrairie then JDA WMS product team, was shutdown. We often joke about that we are bunch of people ‘institutionalized’ by WMS, we have to start Reko to make worth of our years experiences and knowledge or give it all away.
20 months, that’s the average life-span of start-up company, and only 10% start-up company succeed, according to google. We celebrate our 5 year birthday at Reko as survivors with joy and gratitude to our partners, clients, and friends from this small WMS community for their trust and support.
Above all, there’s no better celebration than another successful go-live, and recognization from BlueYonder.
One question was raised few days ago, when I was demonstrating Reko CICD for JDA WMS.
“Is it possible to let your CICD tell me on what screens and what changes have been made? So I can let admin person to follow the findings and do the changes manually?”
I have to confess that I was very confused by the request initially. Isn’t the purpose of CICD to avoid manual work? Then quickly I realized where the question comes from, fear.
To me, there’s no mystery in JDA WMS configuration after almost 20 years working on WMS product and service. Yet there’re more than 500 configuration tables, and thousands of fields, plus huge amount of policies. All those are well-organized and structured, but it scares people away include myself in my rookie years. It DOES take lot of nerve stay in darkness, and pray for the success of a CICD run.
On the other hand, if Reko CICD can generate a report with all details of where the configuration changes happened, then we have a configuration manual right there.
So there it is, a new feature in 2020.1.0. You just create a configuration snapshot before changing WMS configuration, and then you can always get configuration manual to summarize what changes has been made.
January 6, 2020, Shenyang and Zhengzhou, China, we started our 2020 with 2 go-lives at Reko! These 2 sites made Reko Go-live record hit 26. And they are the first JDA WMS implementation Reko did on AWS, with clustered MOCA and Load-Balancing REFS, and more.
Well begun is half done, we look forward a wonderful year ahead, for Reko, and for everyone. Happy new year 2020!
Global Template has become a fancy word in WMS world since last couple of years. It makes lot of sense to build one with a hope that one global template can be used every site to make go-live cost and time efficiently. However, ‘Global Template’ is not ‘Abracadabra’. Here’re some lessons Reko experienced with our customers. All of them are very valuable, literally, in good way or the other.
This kind of template claims it can do anything while nothing is tangible.
Basically it’s whole lot of documents describes how powerful JDA WMS can be and how many different business scenarios it can support. But nothing specific in-term of what exactly WMS should be configured, or what customizations should be made. Project team will end up doing requirement analysis and system configuration from scratch during ‘rollout’.
Sometimes, people have a delusion, that if we can team-up with super smart people, spend long-enough time, and invest huge money, and then we can build a super template cover most, if not all, requirements of future rollout.
A delusion as it is, we are all human bings. Money is spent, and return is little.
JDA WMS is build upon probably the best open framework in the industry. It’s openness provides almost unlimited extendability, yet it is also mis-targeted to take the blame when it follows into wrong hands.
When a global template being enriched along with more and more rollouts, and itself might be filled with spaghetti code. Sooner than expected, it becomes a monster that no-one can maintain or upgrade to new version of JDA.
Contrary to Waterfall, Agile-Like people admit we are not gods.
We spend little money, and only focus on things we are very sure of. We create tangible and workable template, block by block, and site by site. And most importantly, we know what we are building is not perfect, and meant to be changed and enhanced in future.
Agile-like template is a living solution, which can be started with a small seed and little resource, yet it grows and lives at every step.
Modularized template see all developments like Lego blocks, and WMS like Lego City.
We know every module is built to serve different scenarios, and built to be compatible with future versions of JDA. You know what, sometimes our customers build solution with our module that we did even think of when we create it. Happy surprise!
2 or 3 minutes, that’s the answer. While speed actually is not the key here.
Scenario I – Instance Synchronization
Imagine you have a team working on JDA WMS configuration on your Dev instance, and then copy the Dev database to Testing and Production server. And not surprisingly, issues happen during UAT and SIT. Then to resolve any configuration issue, you need to make sure any configuration changes being captured and configured for EVERY instance, MANUALLY.
How to make sure the configuration on all instances are exactly the same? How much resource you can spend back and forth configuration changes and regression testing?
Scenario II – WMS as Template
You have 10 warehouses, following exactly same process. You create one WMS configuration as ‘template’. Then what you gonna do when you create the rest 9 sites? Again, configure everything MANUALLY for 9 times.
Reko CICD is made for the mission to reduce manual effort, cost, and risk of WMS deployment. With this powerful tool, you can do configuration copy in the blink of an eye.
Fear is totally justified when it comes to maintaining a mission critical, yet complex system like JDA WMS, especially when your production instance is running, and you want to make a configuration change or code enhancement.
Reko CICD is designed for continues deployment for both code change and configuration change. No manual work on production instance is needed. Contact Reko for details.
May 24, 2019, Singapore, the first outbound truck was closed and dispatched for one of the world top footwear retailer store delivery. This is the 3rd Reko JDA WMS go-live in 2019, and the 2nd one in Singapore.
Successful JDA WMS go-live is not unusual for Reko. Yet what makes this one unique is Reko did literally zero coding on this project. Not any RF change, none business logic, but all by standard feature with configuration. Even EDIs were adopted to standard JDA EDI.
People might think this is a simple warehouse. Well, there’s nothing simple in retail industry now days, especially fashion. We implemented list picking, packing, cross-docking, for both B2B store delivery and B2C On-line orders.
JDA’s Technical Architect is probably the best one in supply chain industry. Its flexibility and openness for customization is beyond compare, which makes itself a open platform for developers almost can do anything with it. While real professional and disciplined project team knows how messy it could be when this advanced technology fall into wrong hands. JDA WMS is not only about its technology, it’s about best industry practices from thousands of clients and experts who brought in years of knowledge from field. It’s like by-pass the most knowledgeable books in the best supply chain library and pick up a good pen and paper to write your own book.
Don’t get me wrong, customization IS necessary in many cases to make the best out of WMS. But it will be another discussion for another day regarding the principles for a GOOD customization. For now, we congratulate our client and project team for their success.
March 27, 2019, Sydney, Australia became the 10th country where Reko had successful JDA WMS implementation. This is Kuehne-Nagel facility for one of leading apparel company in the world. The site operation covers B2B to customer stores and partners, and B2C support for on-line shopping. The operation includes cross-docking, list picking, order packing, and customized receiving and sorting functionalities due to customer’s high value good.
It’s been a joyful, yet sometime challenging journey for Reko to work with people from so many countries with variety of culture backgrounds. The more we learned from so diversified cultures through our work, the more confidence we have in the prosperity of Asia Pacific.
