Supply chain execution vendors far and wide were forced to bite the bullet in 2009 as a worldwide economic malaise dried up legions of sales opportunities. Few fared worse than providers of warehouse management systems, which endured a slowdown so severe that the total industry shrank to its 2005 size.
So finds industry analyst firm ARC Advisory, which this summer issued a report saying that in 2009 the WMS industry was “pummeled” by the economic tide.
“WMS was one of the worst-performing of the supply chain markets,” Steve Banker, ARC analyst and lead author of the report, told Managing Automation. “As a matter of fact, I can’t think of any supply chain market that performed worse than the WMS market.”
Banker has not identified a direct cause, but said at least some of the decline was the result of a popular strategy among enterprise applications users in 2009: milk an existing WMS system instead of upgrading or replacing it.