Development of the framework for the 3PL company for selecting WMS based on customers’ operational characteristics

Abstract

The current thesis has the exploratory and descriptive research purpose to develop a framework for the Finnish 3PL operator. While, this framework contains key customer’s characteristics essential for the 3PL to possess serving its customer with the most suitable WMS. The research validity is enhanced with the triangulation data analysis. The secondary data collected with a systematic literature review acknowledges a research gap in the amount of published research and indicates rarely studied phenomena in this topic direction. With underlined theoretical part evidences, the empirical part utilizes mixed research approaches to acquire the primary. These is the case company operations overview, semi-structured interview and benchmarking of WMS vendors responses to develop the framework for the 3PL company for selecting WMS for a customer and own operations most efficiently. The case company provided the WMS vendors names to interview and offered expert collaboration for the framework development. Finally, the five WMS framework topics for the 3PL to consider in a WMS choice for a customer are software types, vendor expertise, warehouse characteristics, technical criteria and sensitive deployment issues. Moreover, the resulted framework comprises key aspects for the 3PL to evaluate with questions to address for a customer. As the conclusion, the theoretical value and managerial implications are presented with future research steps in this area.