Instant warehouse is dead. Long live LOKIA WMS!

Le Roi est mort, vive le Roi! As of 15 November 2018, we upgraded the last client of Instant warehouse to a new warehouse solution LOKIA WMS that fully took over cloud “reigning” in customer warehouses. The warehouse system LOKIA manages, records and evaluates warehouse processes and increases productivity of warehouse workers and reduces their error rate. Its advantage is easy deployment that was inherited from its predecessor but it has added to it a range of add-on modules that facilitate its usage. However, every legendary solution has got a long history. LOKIA WMS is no exception. How did it all begin?

Managed warehousing is coming

Since 1993, CCV Information systems has been implementing enterprise information systems. In 2000, it started providing the ERP solution Navision, later named Microsoft Dynamics. However, they ran into several customers who needed managed warehousing, which has led to the decision to create a specialised WMS add-on – Warehouse Management System. In 2003, a project of managed warehouse for the logistics centre Tempo Opava (formerly Jednota Opava) was deployed, which won IT project of the year award from the hands of Minister of Informatics and a number of logistics awards from the professional public.

CCV Managed warehouse continued to grow on technologies of Microsoft Dynamics and under the hands of Brno developers into a massive industrial solution for managing warehouses, that can handle the most demanding customer requirements. There have been dozens of successful deployments at wholesale and manufacturing companies, and due to the large number of features, there was no logistic process that it could not handle.

And what about smaller enterprises?

However, the number of features and overall robustness of the CCV Managed Warehouse made it practically unusable for smaller businesses that did not have such high demands on the functionality of a warehouse system. The introduction of a comprehensive warehouse system was unnecessarily costly for these businesses. However, smaller companies have also struggled with similar warehouse problems. And so the CCV developers came in June 2014 with a “package” solution Instant warehouse. It was a simple and quickly adjustable warehouse system that was provided as a service as an alternative to sophisticated WMS systems.

Less is sometimes more

As a result, CCV has been providing for several years two much different warehouse solutions intended for much different customer segments. At the same time, a new trend has been quickly emerging on the enterprise systems market. Complex monolithic ERP systems began to be perceived negatively with regard to their time-consuming and costly implementation. Therefore, they were being replaced by lighter modern systems that used web services to handle interfacing with specialised software so that the use of standard versions of these systems was maximized and businesses were not burdened by custom development and maintenance.

The best packaged in standard

Combining the experience of robust and complex warehouse management solution that could handle even the most complex warehouse processes with the experience of light cloud solution (Instant warehouse), a modern warehouse system LOKIA WMS was created. It builds on two basic pillars: a platform that provides all basic warehouse processes and a variety of optional add-on modules.  

The very foundation of LOKIA WMS solution will, thus, help customers instantly get an accurate and up-to-date overview of the placement of goods in warehouse. It does not contain any unnecessary modules and is so user-friendly that it facilitates also quick training of new employees. Optimized and scalable form is then achieved by optional add-on features so that customer really uses only what they need and does not have to bother with useless and expensive features.