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.
Lesson I – Conceptual Template
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’.
Lesson II – Waterfall Template
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.
Lesson III – Deep-Coupled Template
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.
Lesson IV – Agile-Like Template
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.
Lesson V – Modularized Template
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!