Content
OpenWMS.org is a flexible and free-to-use warehouse management and material flow control system. It is flexible because it can be tailored depending on the required functionality in the actual customer project. If, for example, a warehouse management is not required, this functionality can simply be omitted. Even more fine-grained tailoring is possible. If a project does not require Picking processes, the OpenWMS.org WMS Picking Service can be omitted either.
OpenWMS.org is free-to-use because the sourcecode is available as opensource under the Apache 2.0 opensource license. Hence consultancies, integrators or any other development team can download the software as source or pre-built container images, customize it for the end-customer projects need and sell it with the project.
Business Drivers & Goals
Because the software is free-to-use there is not a superficial business model for the authors. What is the business driver or goals of this project? The authors offer consulting, coaching as well as development services based on OpenWMS.org.
The driver for the authors is to make OpenWMS.org a widely used framework to build projects in the intralogistics domain with.
The business goal is to even extend this vision to make OpenWMS.org a disruptive software framework in the warehouse management and logistics software and to replace any other closed source warehouse management and material flow control software.
Requirements
The most important functional requirements of the OpenWMS.org project.
- OpenWMS.org must offer a Material Flow Control (MFC) solution for automated warehouses and should also provide a base solution for manual warehouses
- OpenWMS.org must provide WMS modules for the basic warehouse management processes that can be used as-is or as a base for custom implementations
The existing and upcoming functionality of OpenWMS.org is comprised by the issues tracked in GitHubs issue tracker. Notice, that most of the requirements target on particular microservices only and are therefor directly put in one microservice' issue trackers.
Quality Goals
In a nutshell
- OpenWMS.org must be built flexible and customizable enough to be tailorable in every particular project to the required functionality
- Building applications, solutions and projects on top of OpenWMS.org must be painful and simple as possible in order to minimize the effort in customer projects
- Systems built on OpenWMS.org must behave in a consistent and reliable manner. Data loss and deadlock situations must always be prevented
In detail
An increasing list o quality goals…
| Domain | Priority | Characteristic | Scenario |
|---|---|---|---|
| WMS | High | Accountability | The system must durably store who triggered when what kind of critical operation |
| TMS | High | Performance | Requests that drive the material flow control, in OSIP a REQ, must be answered in less than 200ms |
| TMS | High | Availability | Critical processes in TMS must not depend on the availability of WMS processes |
| General | High | Performance | Processing orders in each domain must not affect the performance the processing in other domains |
| General | Medium | Reliability, Maintainability | Software changes must be applied within zero downtime of the whole system and may not affect unchanged parts of the system in terms of availability |
| General | Medium | Portability | The system must not depend on any runtime platform to make it portable across different runtime environments |
| General | Medium | Installability, Performance | Solutions built on top of OpenWMS.org can be split into parts that run on different platforms. Some parts may require to run close to hardware in order to fulfill performance requirements |
| General | Low | Extendability | The system must be built in order to be highly extendable in customer projects |