Warehouse Control System

Our Warehouse Control System (WCS) provides a central point of management and control for your entire material handling equipment (MHE) portfolio. It works seamlessly across multiple automation technologies and vendors, enabling you to orchestrate your operations and optimize the flow of material throughout the facility.

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Supply Chain Solutions
Warehouse Control System

What are the challenges?

Warehouses and distribution centers (DC) increasingly deploy automation technology and material handling equipment (MHE) to meet rising throughput requirements. This typically leads customers to deploy mixed portfolios of MHE, with different automation technologies from multiple vendors that need to be managed individually. However, managing automation systems individually poses significant challenges. Operating a multi-vendor MHE infrastructure as a unified solution becomes increasingly difficult. It also prevents businesses from leveraging their automation solution to its full potential and from achieving targeted ROI.

Some of the challenges include:

Actual system performance falls short of projected increases in throughput and fulfillment capacity
Tracing the cause of malfunctions and bottlenecks is time-consuming
Material routing can not be changed fast enough to accommodate receipt changes or to avoid problem zones
Lack of end-to-end material visibility across the automation chain

What are the benefits?

Our WCS offer provides a vendor-neutral solution that effectively orchestrates diverse material handling technologies. Serving as a centralized hub, it coordinates and manages transport tasks across different warehouse automation systems. It also ensures uninterrupted material flow, even in the event of device failures.

The WCS integrates with the Warehouse Management System (WMS), leveraging order and inventory information to optimize the material flow. It also interfaces with the logic controllers in the MHE to directly control material movements. The result is seamless process integration, from the WMS to the physical material handling aspects.

Our WCS also enhances warehouse throughput and performance, enabling customers to fully utilize their MHEs and unlock unrealized productivity gains.

Our expert team will work closely with you to tailor the WCS implementation to your specific requirements and automation environment, maximizing its performance and ROI.

Continuously optimized material flow

End-to-end automation visibility

Vendor-agnostic flexibility

Scalable by design

“Many of our customers use our Warehouse Control System in highly complex operations across a range of MHE systems and with millions of communication telegrams per day. Our system efficiently manages their entire material flow and allows them to fully benefit from their investment.”

Ralf Leuthner
Infios

Our key capabilities

Automated environments
Our WCS manages and controls mixed portfolios of MHE and automation equipment. This means it is a natural fit for the type of complex warehouse operations that analyst firm Gartner describes as level 4 (intelligent) and level 5 (automated) warehouse facilities. These typically process large amounts of orders which necessitate the broader use of MHE and warehouse automation.
Deployment flexibility
Our WCS solution offers a high level of integration capability – not only with various supported automation equipment, but also with the customer’s existing supply chain systems landscape. It also seamlessly integrates with our WMS as well as third-party solutions.
New or existing facilities
Our project teams have successfully completed numerous WCS implementations. When it comes to greenfield facilities, we work closely with system integrators and automation vendors to model and simulate the operation and performance of the future automation solution. This ensures that the WCS delivers high-level performance and scalability. In existing facilities, the WCS can be deployed into the existing automation landscape and ongoing operation to minimize downtime.