If your warehouse managing system partner promises resiliency, it’s not good enough. Confidence is in; resiliency is out.
This is a year of uncertainty for customers and shippers alike. Conquering it will require a complete mind shift that uses flexible WMS (warehouse management system) integrations to replace reactions with anticipation, strategic risk mitigation, and continuous innovation.
Benefits of WMS integrations
Expect the labor crunch, inflation, political instability, and global conflicts to continue affecting supply chains. Those are all givens. What about the challenges you don’t know of yet?
Growth-minded companies put the future of their supply chains in a warehouse managing system that makes them ready for anything. Because, as we all know, supply chain surprises will always be TBD.
For businesses across industries, the benefits of WMS integrations span operational efficiencies and strategic advantages:
- Enhanced Flexibility: WMS integrations enable rapid adaptation to market changes, supply chain disruptions, and unexpected challenges without requiring expensive system overhauls or lengthy implementation periods.
- Cost Optimization: Ready-made integrations significantly reduce implementation costs, technical resource requirements, and time-to-value compared to custom development approaches, with savings of up to 60% over three years.
- Operational Efficiency: Automated data exchange between systems eliminates manual entry, reduces errors, and streamlines processes across your entire supply chain ecosystem from order entry to final delivery.
- Strategic Innovation: Integration-first architecture transforms your WMS into a central nervous system that can quickly connect with new technologies and capabilities as your business evolves and grows.
- Risk Mitigation: Pre-built, tested integrations provide reliable connections that reduce implementation risks while ensuring consistent performance across all connected systems and trading partners.
- Scalability: Adding new locations, channels, or business units requires minimal additional development work, enabling rapid expansion without technical barriers or excessive costs.
- Future-Proofing: Cloud-native platforms with extensive integration libraries ensure your warehouse technology can adapt alongside emerging business requirements and technological advances.
Warehouse managing system integrations create confidence
Most companies have a solid idea of what innovation they need to deploy next to hit their desired confidence levels. However, the inflexibility of their legacy warehouse managing system and ERP bolt-ons have made innovation expensive, time-consuming, and often impossible.
Types of WMS integrations
Ecommerce integrations
Out-of-the-box ecommerce integration capabilities of your WMS play a significant role in your operations. These ensure seamless, automated data exchange and alignment with crucial operational functions. A library of pre-built, tested ecommerce integrations ensures quick onboarding time for new systems.
If you’re selling in ecommerce environments like Amazon FBA and WooCommerce, integrations reliably sync product information, financial data and other ERP data, POs, vendor management, and more. System support is no longer a risk, but a competitive advantage and enabler of the business to pivot quickly.
Shipping integrations
Streamline logistics and fulfillment every step of the way. Connect important fulfillment operations to shipping carrier systems, allowing your business to deliver: accurate, real-time tracking updates. The system’s rate shopping feature allows users to auto-generate shipping labels, and compare shipping rates and carrier performance, in a single, easy-to-use shipping management application within your WMS.
One point of caution: Many warehouse managing systems only offer a few mainstream carriers in their integration library. Some will claim an integration, but then the price tag arises during scoping and implementation for a custom code project to make it happen. Cloud-built platforms like Deposco develop dozens every year (now over 150) to maximize your shipping efficiencies. These are fully implemented, managed, and supported by the WMS partner.
Related: Reduce shipping costs 2-20% in just a few clicks with WMS Rate Shopping
Marketplaces
The list of specific marketplace rules and regulations for labeling, packing, and shipping gets longer yearly. Non-compliance leads to stiff penalty fees and chargebacks after packages have left your warehouse. No two sets of policies are alike and imperfect knowledge between your warehouse teams quickly adds up financially in penalties.
Marketplace integrations help your business track and streamline processes to comply with these guidelines, saving time and money. The burden of knowing and applying each set of rules is shifted from the worker to the system ensuring consistent execution. These warehouse managing system integrations also help streamline the returns process, speeding up refunds for your customers while improving your marketplace seller standings.
Retailer/Electronic Data Interchange (EDI)
EDI integrations in a WMS are used to streamline operations, improve inventory management, and enhance order fulfillment in B2B. They automate data exchange, reducing manual errors and streamlining processes while providing real-time inventory updates to enable effective stock management.
Warehouse managing system integrations for EDI also ensure compliance with retailer-specific shipping and labeling requirements that are always changing. Ultimately, they lead to massive time and cost savings.
Materials Handling Equipment (MHE)
MHE software integration within a cloud WMS enhance efficiency, productivity, and orchestration between different equipment types. This is critical to improve your peak-season warehouse management health. Seamless communication between the WMS and warehouse equipment leads to better resource utilization and real-time tracking of goods.
Integrated WMS and MHE systems help your company monitor equipment usage, reduce manual labor, improve warehouse space utilization, and minimize equipment downtime significantly reducing costs. Advanced systems report on the status of machinery – from location to battery status – in real time and provide maintenance recommendations.
Cartonization
Cartonization is strategic to growing your business. Integrations for cartonization enable you to find hidden savings while improving responsibility for ESG and emissions. Quick to deploy via a modern warehouse managing system, these solutions provide integrated warehouse automation to identify things like:
- Which carton format is ideal?
- Are the SKUs going into the box fragile, nestable, or foldable?
- Does it meet carrier requirements?
- Can we easily relay dimensioning to a custom box builder?
Transportation Management System (TMS)
TMS integrations streamline the planning, execution, and optimization of outbound loads. They provide real-time visibility into transportation activities – including owned and contracted assets, enabling better shipment tracking and management.
TMS integrations drive significant cost savings by optimizing route planning and reducing manual tasks providing that information directly to the warehouse. Furthermore, real-time tracking information improves customer service, including highly accurate delivery estimates and timely updates.
Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP)
Related: NetSuite ERP is Not a Warehouse Management System
Reliable warehouse managing system integration with existing systems is critical to operational efficiency. Integrations for ERP provide enhanced visibility and cost-effectiveness by streamlining information flow between traditionally siloed systems and the WMS, reducing manual data entry and tasks.
They provide real-time updates on inventory, orders, and shipments, enabling better management and planning. Your warehouse managing teams use the system to make more accurate forecasts and decisions by synching real-time inventory data and trends.
Ultimately, these integrations reduce errors, improve inventory management, and optimize resource allocation for the company. The payoff is particularly big when using an ERP that has reached its limitations or is being stretched into purposes for which it was never intended. A purpose-built WMS uses integrations to take data from the ERP and perform the functions that were never possible in the ERP.
How hidden deployment costs happen
The promise of out-of-the-box (OOTB) WMS and order management systems sounds compelling: rapid deployment, minimal customization, faster implementation. It just works! Yet industry discussions reveal a significant gulf between promise and reality.
One major logistics provider we work with shared his experience, prior to Deposco, that illustrates this challenge perfectly:
Despite selecting what they thought was a modern warehouse management system with API-based EDI integrations, they discovered that “basically, all it was was an integration layer that catches all the EDI files… Our clients’ operations are not always like those of the core retailers. Many need very specific templates.”
If it sounds too good to be true… it probably is.
Traditional vs. pre-built WMS integration approaches
The integration challenge highlights a critical distinction in the market between two fundamentally different approaches:
Traditional OOTB WMS Integrations: While most vendors in the WMS space advertise standardized WMS or OMS integrations, they still require significant custom development work. Even with “standard” EDI templates, each implementation demands translation layers, custom mapping, and extensive configuration work behind the scenes.
Pre-Built Socket Integrations: Modern platforms like Deposco offer truly plug-and-play WMS integrations that eliminate the need for custom integration development. These sockets provide immediate connectivity with minimal configuration required.
Customizations with “standard” integration claims
Organizations often find that WMS platforms marketed as having ‘superior integration capabilities’ still require extensive customization work.
The depth of knowledge and hands-on support from your partner becomes critical when these complexities emerge. The key question to ask:
- Who would you trust to guide you through these challenges? A third-party consultant with limited investment in your success? Or a platform partner that specializes in building native integrations?
Go inside our five consecutive years on the Inc. 5000 and what consistency means for your software selection.
What vendors present as “plug-and-play” integrations often demand substantial backend work, custom mapping, and ongoing maintenance to handle real-world business requirements. As one 3PL noted before switching to Deposco: “We ended up managing our own integration layer because many of our customers can’t make changes on their side.” These hidden costs frequently extend implementation timelines by 40-60% beyond initial estimates.
Factors that delay implementations
Several factors contribute to extended implementation timelines when organizations rely on traditional OOTB supply chain integration approaches:
Hidden Custom Development: “Standard” warehouse integrations requiring significant backend development work can add months or years to deployment schedules, inflating your total cost of ownership to levels you never thought you’d have to defend. That’s also time your technical team does not have.
Integration Layer Dependencies: Sometimes, integration middleware must be built. Without a partner to handle this complexity for you, things get hairy fast. You’ll likely end up building your own, and who has time for that? However, if your supply chain software partner takes these dependencies off your hands, it’s a real time and money saver. As one 3PL company described: “Once the functionality is in the integration layer and those other avenues are built, you can just replicate it for other customers.”
EDI Integration Challenges: Even seemingly straightforward EDI connections require custom work to handle the varying data formats, transaction sets, and business rules across different trading partners. As one retail operations manager shared: “We thought we could handle EDI mapping internally, but we ended up with penalty fees and our IT team was completely overwhelmed. We should have partnered with experts from day one.”
Legacy System Constraints: Complex organizations spanning multiple countries and business units face additional integration challenges when standardizing across diverse operational requirements. These constraints often force the organization to maintain separate systems that don’t communicate quickly or reliably. This creates data silos, operational inefficiencies, and inaccurate information, leading to shipment delays and other customer-facing issues.
WMS integration best practices
Modern warehouse management software supports multiple integration categories that directly impact operational efficiency. Whether you’re connecting to ecommerce platforms like Shopify or Amazon FBA, shipping carriers for rate shopping and label generation, or EDI systems for retailer compliance, the breadth of available integrations determines your operational flexibility.
The key is ensuring your WMS partner offers pre-built connections across all these categories rather than requiring custom development for each integration type.
Drawing from industry experiences and successful implementations, several WMS integration best practices can help your organization navigate complexity more effectively:
Evaluate Integration Architecture Early
Before selecting a supply chain platform, understand whether it requires custom integration layers or provides direct, pre-built connections. Ask vendors to demonstrate true plug-and-play functionality vs. “standard” integrations.
Prioritize Breadth of Pre-Built Integrations
Choose platforms that offer a broad library of natively built connectors (or as well call them, sockets) to avoid the hidden complexities that plague traditional implementations. Deposco’s 150+ pre-built sockets eliminate the need for custom development work while maintaining build-as-you-need-it flexibility.
Plan for Standardization Without Compromising Requirements
Template-based configurations maintain standardization while allowing for the necessary flexibility to meet unique business needs. It’s crucial here to document common EDI variations and their implementation approaches upfront.
Build Internal Integration Expertise
Develop internal champions who understand both your business requirements and the technical integration landscape. Organizations that rely entirely on partner implementation often struggle with post-deployment optimization. Ensure that the partners include a structured train-the-trainer onboarding process.
Gordon Companies started onboarding new seasonal staff in just 30 minutes during their first peak season on Deposco. Establishing consistent processes on all 5 warehouses cut their shipping times from 4 days to next-day fulfillment, creating their easiest holiday season ever.
Implement Phased Rollouts
Rather than attempting organization-wide deployments simultaneously, consider pilot implementations to refine processes before rolling them out more broadly. This approach helps identify integration challenges early while they’re easier to address.
Set Realistic Timeline Expectations
Acknowledge upfront that integration complexity may extend beyond initial estimates, especially with traditional OOTB approaches. Build buffer time into project plans for unexpected customization needs. However, with pre-built Sockets, you can reach operational efficiency in 90 days or less, positively impacting success now, NOT in a year.
Pre-built integrations drive measurably better outcomes
Faster Implementation: Deployment timelines are reduced by 50-70% compared to custom integration approaches, with many connections completed in days rather than weeks.
Lower Total Cost of Ownership: The elimination of custom development and ongoing maintenance reduces integration costs by up to 60% over a three-year period.
Immediate Connectivity: No custom development required – connections work with minimal configuration or technical resources.
Reduced Risk: Standardized data flows eliminate integration failures that commonly occur with custom mapping approaches.
Built-in Expertise: Inexperience is also risky. Rather than outsourcing, tap a partner that has done thousands of integrations and is ready to guide your success at every turn.
Scalability: Adding new locations or channels does not require additional development work.
Real-World Results: Organizations like Fulfillment Strategies International (FSI) demonstrate these benefits in practice. After switching to Deposco’s pre-built socket approach, FSI’s IT team was freed from constant integration development and maintenance work.
“Before Deposco, any improvements we created and maintained ourselves. Our IT team now has time to work on other initiatives.” – Alston Callwood, IT Manager/Principal Developer
The deployment enabled FSI to easily add over 40 new trading partners while providing clients with live dashboards and real-time visibility into operations.
The project enabled a 44% increase in total orders picked per month and a 10.6% increase in number of orders picked per hour with 99.88% real-time inventory accuracy.
Tips for evaluating WMS integrations
When evaluating WMS or OMS solutions, consider these factors to ensure successful implementation:
Verify True Socket Capability
Is the partner delivering a product or just a project that will become a product in a future release? Request actual customer references from potential partners demonstrating their plug-and-play functionality with similar organizations.
Assess Long-term Maintenance
Consider the ongoing effort required to maintain custom integrations versus pre-built sockets. If a vendor isn’t transparent about maintenance requirements, that often indicates underlying complexity that will impact your team long-term.
Request Implementation Timelines
Compare actual deployment timelines from similar organizations, focusing specifically on integration completion dates rather than overall project timelines.
Plan for Scalability
Ensure the integration approach can scale across multiple locations and business units without requiring custom development for each expansion.
Most WMS companies say they check all the boxes, but subtle differences have significant long-term consequences on your decision. Use this template to find out what to ask, so you select the WMS that’s right for your business, from the start.
The path forward
The distinction between traditional OOTB integrations and true pre-built socket approaches is clear: organizations that choose platforms like Deposco avoid the hidden complexities and extended timelines that plague traditional implementations. Rather than building custom integration layers, they can focus on optimizing operations and driving business value.
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Deposco offers the industry’s largest library of pre-built warehouse management system integrations. Ask us to show how quickly we can help you scale your supply chain operations for growth.