Crafting TWIGA WMS; SDLC through my lens.
Around June of 2022, we finally went Live on our in-house build WMS (WAREHOUSE MANAGEMENT SYSTEM) solution at TATU City Distribution Center. It was a mega milestone achieved through long nights and days by a team that refused to give up. A team brought together by a winning culture! Brought together a Ninja renowned as Evans Mwendwa, Head of Product and Projects, a leader, a legend! “It’s going to be a complex project but doable,” Evans said. #ForeverInOurHearts.
Twiga needed to expand to a new automated distribution center in Tatu City, Nairobi, in mid-2021. In the previous 2–3 years, Twiga as a business had been experiencing exponential growth, hence the need for physical storage and processing infrastructure expansion, closely followed by tech infrastructure. The existing tech infrastructure was adequate but not efficient enough. Stakeholders decided to procure a 3rd party WMS solution for better and more efficient warehouse management since this is the core of the business. Insufficient warehouse storage capacity; means limited stocks under inventory, leading to under-supplies, which = bad for business!
@James Kirwa (a senior software engineer) and his team were tasked with locating a fully-functioning, reputable WMS solution provider. Off they gallivanted! Within no time, they had settled on two final candidates among many others. “Long story short, “The WMS solutions settled on, did not meet Twiga’s unique requirements and specific needs due to the level of seamlessness and integration we wanted. 🙁
Think of yourself as an architectural engineer. You are building a house for a family of three; a wife, a son, and a father. The wife wants a kitchen the size of the entire plot of land; the son wants a bedroom larger than the master bedroom, and the father wants a modern unit, where everyone can happily live. That was WMS!
Being part of the product and engineering team, we had to negotiate and consolidate a mirage of stakeholder requirements, sit in work-flow negotiations, focus groups, process analysis push-back, and finally produced the final requirements document. Woefully, these documents continuously mutated, affecting the initial project plan timelines and deliverables. Agility in spirit and culture is what we had; after working at Twiga for a while, the change in business needs over a brief period did not come as a surprise. The team quickly adjusted to changing deliverables and delivered. We had solid requirements documentation and designs in less than three months.
Dev work finally started! These processes were set off by an initial architectural analysis, security, functional requirements definition, and risk assessment. Best practices such as using agreeable frameworks, consistent code review, and unit tests, etcetera, allowed for fast and efficient feature delivery. SRE engineers and the QA team came in handy as quality gatekeepers, taking control of release pipelines and ensuring product quality.
TWIGA WMS is quite a sizeable, feature-rich piece of software with numerous capabilities and segments. The rollout journey had to be efficiently mapped and executed. The Engagement team (ET) was well prepped & at the core of it; They oversaw training, release, and the support “storm”. Hesitant end-user uptake, due to a considerable shift from brick-and-mortar warehouse WOW to full automation, was their biggest obstacle at the time. The ET strategy worked like a charm, albeit with a few obstacles! The release and implementation process was very procedural and phased according to stakeholder grouping.
At last, we are ready to move to Prod! Why not, we had documented right? Built right? Tested right? Trained, right? Why not? The shock on us, a blizzard of issues blasted our way! Damn it!
As is the case with any piece of software, our first live trial uncovered issues that required rethinking and addressing. There were a few hiccups with our WMS solution. Key on-ground user scenarios were constantly evolving and changing; desk, field, and user simulation tests unreliable. Time and the boss were not on our side, pun intended, so there had to be an abrupt change of gears.
Throughout the following few weeks, several strategies — including; further load & performance tests, crowd testing with actual users, user hand-holding, post-Go-live support & feedback gathering, and support peer-peer champions — magically transformed our previous blizzard into an ideal, friction-less WMS solution.
This cutting-edge work of art could hence expedite dispatch for over 35,000 unique product items in about 6 hours.
Voila!
I am happy and proud to be part of the team in this epic journey, both a part of the product and engineering team and more specifically in Product Engagement / Quality Engineer.
WMS has been a journey; we have learned and unlearned. Team members agreed and disagreed, and work-life balance became a foreign vocabulary. In conclusion, the team had a vision, promised to deliver, and did! We might have not initially gotten things working as expected but eventually hit the bull’s eye. That is the epitome of the WMS evolution through my lens.
