Gartner，TMS/SCM/WMS系统，魔力象限

Magic Quadrant for Warehouse

Management Systems

Published 30 June 2021 - ID G00733892 - 99 min read

By Simon Tunstall, Dwight Klappich

The WMS market is mature, but competition is growing on

pricing, support for automation, geography, partner networks,

adaptability and cloud services. Supply chain technology

capabilities such as:

• Receiving

• Put-away

• Stock locating

• Inventory management

• Cycle counting

• Task interleaving

• Wave planning

• Order allocation

• Order picking

possibly, RFID scanning/sensing to form the transactional foundation of a

WMS. This enables efficiencies of directed work activity and the delivery of

accurate information in near real time. Gartner includes integrated

functionality — what we refer to as extended WMS capabilities (see Apply an

Architectural Framework to Stratifying Warehouse Management Systems) —

as components of a WMS evaluation.

These extended WMS capabilities include:

• Workforce/labor management

• Slotting

• Yard management

The overall WMS market breaks down into five types of vendors, the first four

of which are covered in this Magic Quadrant:

• Application megasuite vendors: These vendors offer broad portfolios of

applications across most application categories (e.g., back-office

financials, human capital management, customer relationship

management, customer order management, manufacturing, enterprise

resource planning [ERP] and supply chain management [SCM]). While

these vendors might offer a variety of SCM solutions, they do not

necessarily offer an integrated platform. Infor, Oracle and SAP are

considered megasuite vendors with WMS offerings.

human capital management. While these vendors might offer a variety

of SCM solutions, they do not necessarily offer an integrated platform

(although some do). Vendors in this category include Blue Yonder

• Specialist WMS suite vendors: These vendors are independent

software vendors (ISVs) that focus primarily, but not necessarily

exclusively, on holistic WMS suites. In addition to WMSs, they might

offer additional, complementary capabilities, but these remain a modest

percentage of their business. Vendors in this category included in this

Magic Quadrant are Ehrhardt Partner Group (EPG), Generix Group,

Made4net, Mantis, Reply, Softeon, Synergy Logistics, Tecsys and

Vinculum.

• Material handling equipment/automation vendors: Most material

handling equipment (MHE) vendors primarily focus on providing the

electromechanical aspects of large-scale, automated warehouses.

However, many of these vendors also offer some WMS capabilities as

part of their portfolio of products. We only cover MHE firms as part of

this research if they can demonstrate that they routinely sell their

Quadrant, these vendors are specialized ISVs that focus exclusively on

offering stand-alone components that can be used to supplement a

WMS; they do not offer a full WMS. Examples of these components

include workforce/labor management, slotting

optimization, multicarrier parcel management, yard management,

dock/appointment scheduling, warehouse control systems (WCSs),

warehouse execution systems (WESs) and other specialized add-on

solutions (see Warehousing and Fulfillment Vendor Guide).

WMS Market Considerations

All solutions in the Magic Quadrant for Warehouse Management Systems

Despite being a very mature market, WMS offerings continue to differ in areas

like usability, adaptability, decision support, scalability both up and down

market, and life cycle costs. Furthermore, customers increasingly favor supply

chain suites that can support end-to-end supply chain and logistics process

orchestration. Gartner refers to these areas as supply chain (SC)

convergence (see Unify End-to-End Supply Chain Processes With Supply

Chain Convergence). Focus on the breadth and depth of WMS offerings

remains valid for the most sophisticated operations while other factors like

simplicity, usability and cost of ownership are more important factors in less

complex environments. However, we continue to see a bifurcation in the WMS

market between the high-performance, complex and sophisticated end of the

market and the mass market where “good enough” functionality is “good

enough.” This is not because companies choose to sacrifice functionality. It’s

because globally the preponderance of warehouse operations are Level 3 or

This bifurcation highlights that there is a very clear market for high-end WMS

solutions where feature/function and performance are critical and cost is less

of an issue. This makes for a healthy, although smaller, market for high-end,

functionally robust WMS solutions aimed at complex and sophisticated Level

4 and Level 5 operations. Conversely, there is another market where other

factors dominate such as ease of use, reliability, service and support, “good

enough” features, and lower cost of ownership. This is a very large WMS

market for what Gartner’s stratification model would call Level 2 and Level 3

with any good WMS, and they would be satisfied with a megasuite-vendor-

provided WMS or a less functionally robust ISV WMS offering.

Although functionality remains at the top of the list of user evaluation criteria,

there’s near-functional parity for core WMS capabilities across WMS

providers. Given the mature state of the WMS marketplace, a combination of

the following vendor and product topics affects the positioning of vendors in

this year’s Magic Quadrant:

• The vendor’s market understanding and its vision for next-generation

• The vendor’s proven track record of commercializing, delivering and

deploying innovations to the market

• Investments to address total cost of ownership (TCO) and customer

time to value

• The WMS’s technical architecture to support adaptability and

extensibility

• The long-term viability of the vendor and product, given the long life

span of WMSs

• Current and projected growth of both revenue and total number of

clients

• Market awareness, name recognition and reputation

• Product or vendor differentiation

• Integration with other applications and support for cross-functional

process orchestration

• The vendor’s ability to sell, implement and support global deployments

• The vendor’s ability to deliver value through service, support,

consulting and training

• The vendor’s openness to, and support of, an ecosystem of partners

• The vendor’s offering of tools and technologies to facilitate

implementations and support

• Customer experience (from customer references and Gartner customer

interactions)

platform)

Magic Quadrant

Source: Gartner (June 2021)