Episode Details

Want to know how you can deploy a smart warehouse for your business? Today's guest is Dan Gilmore of Softeon, a company that provides a full suite of flexible and robust end-to-end supply chain software solutions to deliver success. He joins Joe Lynch to talk about the idea and technology behind their system. They discuss some of the big trends impacting warehouses, e-commerce, and retail. From labor shortages to automation, Dan enlightens on the benefits of WMS and WES for any business. Tune in to better understand the perks of this new smart technology for optimizing your business!

The section below is transcribed. Transcription has limitations so there may be grammar and typo issues.

Today's topic is the smart warehouse, with my friend, Dan Gilmore. How's it going, Dan?

Great Joe. Very happy to be here today.

Yes, I'm glad I'm finally getting to interview you. Dan, please introduce yourself, and your company, and where you're calling from today.

Yes, again, Dan Gilmore. I'm chief marketing officer of a supply chain software company called Softeon. We'll get into that maybe a little bit more in just a second here, but company's headquartered in Reston, Virginia, just outside Dulles Airport. I happen to be in the Dayton, Cincinnati, Ohio area. Buckeye through and through, so go Bucks.

Why, I got to say go Blue now. Man, you dragged me down. Anyway, Dan, what does Softeon do?

Sure. Well, again, it's a supply chain software company, primarily supply chain execution. The company was founded in 1999, first customer all the way back then was L'Oréal, and just proceeded to build out a suite of solutions, very broad and deep capabilities. That includes warehouse management systems, as I said, that all the stuff that kind of goes around warehouse management systems. People package those differently, but things like labor and resource management, slotting optimization, yard management, and those kind of tools. And then a newer thing, which we'll get into today because it's so critical to what's happening in terms of the smart warehouse, is something called warehouse execution systems, which have been around for a while, but really gained prominence the last couple, three years, as a way to optimize and orchestrate order fulfillment level at a capability that's just beyond even very good tier one WMSs like Softeon has.

And then the category of stuff called distributed order management, which has to do with the optimal sourcing of product based on customer commitments as well as network capacities and constraints, and how do I get the lowest cost alternative that meets the customer needs, very prominently in omnichannel commerce. It's almost essential in retail, but we have a lot of B2B type successes in distributed order management as well. So there's some other things, but that gives you a pretty good flavor of what we do.

You guys started well before eCommerce was a thing, so you still support stores and that kind of warehousing?

Sure, so I mean, in addition to traditional WMS type capabilities, and for retailers, that would largely was store replenishment, now moving in obviously to eCommerce fulfillment, but many retailers are also looking to have a lot of activity at the store level, whether that's buy online, pickup in store, curbside pickup, or store fulfillment, so we've got some solutions there, both in terms of the distributed order management that I just referenced a second ago, is the tool that's going to say, "Hey, the best place to fulfill this order fro