WMS Pioneers

Softeon Chief Revenue Officer Patrick Maley delivered a well-received presentation on how to evaluate robotics and automation for your warehouse during IntraLogisteX UK 2025. This is a bonus episode of the WMS Pioneers podcast that contains the full audio.

Download the robot guide referenced in the episode at https://www.softeon.com/blog/robot-and-goods-to-person-selection-guide/.

In this episode, Softeon CEO Jim Hoefflin and CTO Mark Fralick discuss Softeon’s concept of micro-tuning, philosophy for upgrades, and commitment to creating more value for customers and partners as quickly as possible. Plus, a look back at how the executives’ preseason predictions for their favorite NFL teams, the Packers and Eagles, measure up in December!

In this episode, Softeon CEO Jim Hoefflin and CTO Mark Fralick discuss their decision to join Softeon, the customer-focused culture they're building, and valuable advice for aspiring supply chain professionals on becoming indispensable in their organizations.

Mark has a sneezing spell, while the Pioneers dive into the rise of third-party logistics (3PL), the intricacies of multi-tenant systems, and how Softeon empowers 3PLs to enhance both speed and flexibility.

In this episode, the Pioneers discuss the secrets to a successful WMS implementation, how to avoid death by a thousand keystrokes, and share battle scars from challenging go-lives.

“Brothers from different mothers” as they describe it, Softeon CEO Jim Hoefflin and CTO Mark Fralick have worked together over the last 35 years. The duo, known at Softeon as “WMS Pioneers” developed one of the first Warehouse Management Systems (WMS) in 1993 after realizing there was a market shaping.

Lookout for new episodes every month. Watch them all at https://www.softeon.com/wms-pioneers.

Getting WMS team members on the same page in terms of terminology is a key part of a successful Warehouse Management System project. The WMS Glossary of Terms can help, defining more than 90 terms and acronyms, as an on-line resource or downloadable pdf. Great handout for term members at start of a project. 

Less well-known than the WMS Magic Quadrant, the Gartner Critical Capabilities report ranks WMS vendors purely on functionality across nine attributes, weighted by different levels of warehouse complexity. It is an important companion piece to the MQ to understand the WMS market, as we explain in this podcast.

In the second of our two podcasts featuring highlights of Mark Fralick’s interview with Bob Trebilcock of Modern Materials Handling magazine, Fralick suggests a new way to think about how Warehouse Execution Systems might orchestrate order fulfillment to balance work across the distribution center.

Highlights from a recent Modern Materials Handling magazine podcast featuring editor Bob Trebilcock and Mark Fralick, Chief Technology Officer at Softeon. “Interfacing is easy. Integration is hard,” when it comes to warehouse automation, Fralick says. Trebilcock wants to know why.

We conclude our look at this important but little understood type of supply chain software.

Distributed Order Management or DOM is a powerful and unique tool to optimize order sourcing across an extended network. It is most well known in Omnichannel retail applications, but there are a number of use cases in B2B as well. Learn more in this informative podcast. 

After a somewhat slow start, some lessons learned from dozens of Cloud WMS deployments.

Annual study finds US Logistics Costs as Percent of GDP soared to record level last year.

Washington latest to pass legislation, targeting Amazon but impacting many other companies.

Softeon’s WMS Glossary of Terms provides a great resource for vendor selection and implementation team members.

Gartner recently released its annual Magic Quadrant report on Warehouse Management Systems. In addition to the vendor rankings, we’re always interested in the WMS market analysis Garter provides in the report.

Real estate firm CBRE is out with its latest report, packed with interesting data points.