Background:
A leading U.S.-based telecommunications provider with a rapidly expanding distribution footprint sought to modernize its warehouse operations to support growth, acquisitions, and rising service expectations. As a longtime Oracle EBS WMS customer, the organization faced increasing costs and operational complexity. Intellinum’s Oracle WMS Consulting team partnered with the company to implement Oracle ERP and WMS Cloud, delivering a scalable, standardized warehouse platform across its national distribution network.
Challenges:
- Legacy Oracle EBS WMS environment drove high maintenance costs and operational complexity, limiting agility and scalability.
- Regulatory Requirements with unique business lines of operations and accounting rules.
- Aggressive growth and acquisition plans made it difficult to quickly roll out new distribution centers using the existing WMS architecture.
- Warehouse KPIs lagged industry benchmarks due to outdated, manual, and inconsistent processes across sites.
Solutions:
- Implemented Oracle ERP and Oracle WMS Cloud, leveraging Oracle Integration Cloud (OIC) for third-party system integrations.
- Deployed License Plate Number (LPN) management to reduce scan volume and streamline inbound, outbound, and cycle counting workflows.
- Enabled attribute-based inventory management to support project- and task-driven requirements within a project-based supply chain.
- Enhanced receiving operations with dynamic put-away logic and advanced serial and batch controls.
- Introduced task-driven warehouse execution for cycle counts, batch order picking, and reserve picking with controlled over-picks.
- Incorporated / solutioned unique picking strategies, LPN substitution and over picking and auditable back ordering processes.
- Incorporated / solutioned Advanced Exchange Process with 3 party vendors, to handle field exchanges while honoring costing rules.
- Incorporated / solutioned Rapid OH Load process through IB Shipment, allowing for inventory change over while on boarding new LPN concept with Warehouse Operations.
Results:
- Live on Oracle WMS Cloud across 6 distribution centers, creating a scalable and repeatable warehouse operating model.
- 20–30% reduction in warehouse labor effort through task-driven execution, LPN usage, and reduced scan requirements.
- 25–35% improvement in receiving and putaway throughput enabled by dynamic putaway and optimized receiving workflows.
- 30–40% reduction in manual transactions and exception handling, improving operational consistency and system reliability.
- 15–25% improvement in inventory accuracy driven by LPN management, serial/batch controls, and structured cycle counting.
- 15–25% Increased inventory visibility, users can understand inventory positions within the 4 walls, through readily available screens and web reports, additionally historic inventory transactions are all maintained within the WMS applications recording transactions, times, users, data documents and objects.
- 40–50% faster onboarding of new distribution centers, significantly reducing time and cost to support growth and acquisitions.
- Standardized business processes across all sites, lowering ongoing IT and support overhead by eliminating fragmented WMS configurations.
Estimated percentage improvements based on other similar customer success and industry standards from deploying Oracle WMS Cloud.
Key Takeaways:
- Migrating from Oracle EBS to Oracle WMS Cloud unlocked measurable efficiency gains while reducing operational complexity.
- LPN-driven, task-based execution significantly improved labor productivity, accuracy, and throughput.
- A standardized cloud WMS platform enabled faster scaling, easier acquisitions, and long-term KPI improvement across the distribution network.
- Increased Warehouse Operations visibility, data is maintained and can be viewed for transaction history to identify inventory history.