Softeon has released advanced simulation capabilities as part of its Warehouse Execution System solution, delivering improved distribution performance across multiple time horizons.
Softeon’s WES provides strategic simulations, meaning that it generates insights and actionable data for more longer to mid-term analysis and decision-making, often providing, but not limited to, support for warehouse management system go-lives. These strategic simulation capabilities can be used for several use cases, including the following:
Process Validation: Whether or not the WMS is successfully executing processes, from basic operations to vendor compliance, according to documented expectations. Simulation allows testing of those processes with a fraction of resources typically needed for such testing.
Performance Testing: Is the WMS to be deployed capable of meeting expected performance in terms of throughput and WMS response times?
What-if Analysis: How will changes in WMS settings, materials handling systems, or other processes play out in terms of throughput and productivity? Examples can include anything from turning on task interleaving to adding put walls or other sub-systems into the DC operations. With Softeon’s WES simulation, the impact and performance of these considered changes can be analyzed and understood without physical deployment - improving decision-making and reducing risk.
Softeon uses the same basic engine to perform more tactical simulation to gain insight on a given day or shift’s order pool against resource availability and constraints. This allows, for example, a company to understand early in the day where it may have bottlenecks or resource constraints versus known or expected demand. That initial simulation can be continued throughout the day over different time increments to continuously update the demand for DC resources (people and equipment), re-allocate resources as needed, and potentially re-route some orders if specific process nodes are expected to hit maximum capacity.