JDA/BY WMS Application holds a wealth of data that can allow organizations to manage their Warehouse Execution and utilize the patterns for better prediction of what the future may bring. The key, however, remains that one must first realize that there is a wealth of data, and second set up mechanism for leveraging it.
While many companies have been extracting this data from the application and importing it into their Data Warehouse for analysis, this only allows them to do meaningful historic analysis for establishing trends. A Data Warehouse can leverage data wealth for trend analysis, but it cannot help in fixing a day to day execution problem.
Companies realizing this opt for creating DDAs in the JDA/BY application to focus on day to day KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) so they can react faster to changes to address in a timely manner. It can range from missing shipping deadlines, to poor picking performance to directed work not getting picked up due to personnel or vehicle mis-match.
Once companies start on this path, they are quickly faced with two challenges:
- The DDAs must be accessed through the application, hence the user mobility is sacrificed
- The DDAs cannot show data in charts etc. easily, making the data rendition to be poor
Realizing these shortcomings, the companies then opt for creating and developing outside systems to track this data and setup data extracts or direct database connections into the application causing new challenges:
- When data is extracted, it sacrifices timeliness of the information as a lag is introduced based on the frequency of the extract
- When direct connections to the database are made, there can be an impact on the transactional behavior of the database and problems can arise
- By introducing a new system for data viewing, the organization has created more than one system of record, causing confusion in the user community as to which system to trust
Welcome to the world of Metron!
Smart IS International is introducing Metron to address this organizational challenge and provide mobility and flexibility for the users of JDA/BY application, especially the managers, the supervisors and the organizers to have timely access to data in the palm of their hands.
Smartphone ownership is at 82% mark and rising. It is safe to assume nowadays that a user owns a smartphone and is comfortable using it. Furthermore, 89% of us check our smartphones within an hour of waking up and continue to do it on average 47 times a day. It would thus make sense to provide a capability to utilize this gadget in our hands for accessing the WMS application and the wealth of data it contains.
Again, many organizations may have taken up this challenge as mentioned above and extracted the data from the WMS application and provided Web Screens that may be accessible through the handheld device. But again, in doing so, they added development cost and as mentioned above, created multiple versions of the truth.
With Metron, any DDA in your application is viewable on your handheld device without doing any new development. Just download the application, install it in your device, setup connections to your WMSs and start to access the DDAs.
Furthermore, the Metron application provides you with Charting capabilities, summarizing the data, creating your own favorites and even saving Mobile data views so the same DDA can be viewed in a crisp manner on the handheld device.
So, who are the Metron Users? Anyone currently accessing the DDAs on the JDA/BY application to manage the day to day operation and wishes to break the tether and roam freely in the warehouse.
Welcome to the world of Metron. We hope your usage will be beneficial to your day to day operations. Also, stay tuned to new development around Metron. We don’t want to stop here but want to continue the mobile application paradigm and provide the capability for setting up push notifications, alerts, and even send back acknowledgments for possible corrective actions. Metron is here to open new doorways into your JDA/BY application.
