A failed operational cutover during a warehouse management system (WMS) implementation can have damaging consequences for supplier and customer relationships, putting a company in a hole that takes months to overcome. This is the premise of a new whitepaper, “Operational Keys for a SuccessfulWMS Go-Live,” from Newcourse, a supply chain consulting and system integration firm. The publication identifies five major stages in such a project:
Change Management
- Testing
- Training
- Cutover
- Go-Live Support
Cutover timing is critically important to a project, notes Jim McNerney, Newcourse founder and author of the whitepaper. He states that cutover planning should begin early in the project and should consider the following to ensure proper data migration and validation:
- Will all inbound and outbound orders be complete and associated transactions posted prior to cutover?
- What data does the WMS need?
- Is the data from the existing system sufficient and accurate?
- Can data be migrated from the current legacy system to the new WMS?
- Do tools or scripts already exist that can be used to migrate the data or do we need to develop scripts?
- If data is being migrated, how long will it take to run the scripts and validate the data?
- If data cannot be migrated, how will inventory be loaded into the WMS? How many resources are needed to load initial inventory manually? Does that mean we will need to do a physical inventory? What are the processes for validating data?
The whitepaper also offers details for conducting a mock cutover.
