Sterling Commerce warehouse management system enters Gartner visionaries quadrant

Gartner’s report says: “The most aggressive supply chain practitioners are beginning to shift their focus from lean- and demand-driven supply chain principles to what some have called ‘post-lean’ supply chain principles – or what Gartner calls ‘chaos-tolerant’ processes.” Sterling Warehouse Management Solution (WMS) is part of the Sterling Selling and Fulfillment Suite, aimed at complex warehouse operations – and is claimed to give managers robust planning, execution and measurement tools. It’s based on a service-orientated architecture (SOA), is strong on integration and the goal is helping users to improve order fulfilment by efficiently using inventory available across an extended enterprise – meaning as much of the supply chain as it can touch. Sterling WMS is also said to improve operational productivity through business process modelling, which enables rapid adaptability as markets and customer requirements changes. The company says it also supports value-added services, with, for example, efficient management of light assembly and customer bundling. Gartner says it is seeing increased momentum for application modernisation across the entire enterprise application landscape – and that WMS applications are not exempt from this trend.