April 2000

The new version of Kewill's Commander warehouse management software is one of the keys to its broader e-strategy. Peter Rowlands reports

Even as recently as three years ago, when British software house Kewill Systems started work on a new version of its widely-used Commander warehouse management system, "we didn't know just how big an impact the Internet would have on business." Those are the words of chief executive Geoffrey Finlay.

A measure of the transformation in thinking since then is the fact that as this issue of e.logistics Magazine closed for press, Kewill was moving towards an expected April launch for a new $10 million Web portal site. It is hoping to make this a key international access point for companies involved in "elogistics" a term Kewill itself is using. In a relatively short time-span the Internet has clearly become central to Kewill's thinking.

The company has also announced a strategic link with American software house Syntra to simplify regulatory and tax procedures for companies handling imports and exports of products ordered over the Internet (News, page 4).

The portal site, which may have been announced formally by the time you read this, is clearly still in its early stages, but it sums up the new Web-oriented focus of this very large software house (at the last count it had a staff strength of 800, and was one of Britain's top 250 companies).

Historically its diverse product range has been managed by three separate divisions. It includes off-the-shelf enterprise resource planning systems (a less familiar concept in Britain, but big in the United States); logistics software (Commander is one of the market leaders); and a range of systems for EDI and electronic commerce activities. Now, though, Kewill is moving towards bringing them closer together under a common identity.

Kewill's size can be attributed to a combination of organic growth and strategic acquisitions made during the 1990s. These came at an accelerating pace, and have recently given Kewill the enviable position of holding around 70 per cent of the American market for "carrier compliance" software. Such software allows users to make intelligent selections of express carrier automatically according to consignment size, price and service criteria. Lately this offering has been enhanced by a link with E-Stamp, one of two companies approved to sell US postage stamps over the Internet (News, page 5).

E-commerce was a natural progression for Kewill, which had become an early leader in EDI-related software. Since then it has extended this market presence with products such as EasyTrade and XtraTrade, allowing companies to trade over the Internet (Sainsbury's has been an early and high-profile adopter). Kewill now claims a remarkable 60 per cent UK market share in the field.

As Geoffrey Finlay sums it up: "EDI still has a lot of mileage in it, but it can involve users in a set-up cost of £5,000 to £10,000, plus £1,000 a month service charge to a value-added network. Web trading costs a fraction of that price." The Commander WMS, inherited from acquired company PCL, might once have looked like a separate niche product, but with its broad perspective Kewill is now drawing this into the supply chain mainstream. The new version is built round the Oracle "intelligent" relational database system, which means it can trigger warnings that reverberate right back through the user's supply lines. As sales and marketing manager Simon West-Oliver puts it: "We're not using just the Oracle database, but also Oracle CASE tools." He describes the result as an open computing environment that "creates a more tightly-coupled supply chain execution system."

Features designed to appeal to a modern, possibly multi-user warehouse environment include stock ownership control; allocation of despatch routes to stock items; multiple stock items on a single pallet; automatic or manual PODs; multiple site management; multiple units of measure; a vehicle booking diary; and enhanced drill-down facilities.

Connectivity and configurability have been high priorities in the development. The new Commander product is described as fully Internet-ready, and is intended to be scaleable, which means users can adopt Web browsers for access. West-Oliver describes it as a "one solution fits all" product.

In common with other Oracle applications, it is likely to have Windows NT/2000 and Unix implementations, and it will support the new Wireless Application Protocol. It should be easy to link to host systems such as SAP's. It will also support Kewill's own voice recognition system, which has existed for some years but is now being enhanced to give pickers full hands-free capability.

Kewill's challenge now is to persuade its existing customer base to migrate to the new version; but it has tried to make this attractive by a number of measures. For instance, users need not replace existing radio data terminals (Kewill no longer manufactures the old PCL range, but still supports it). Equally important, they need not change either PCs or business practices.