What a WMS costs in South Africa

Is that a 4 or a 6?

Somebody writes a quantity on a pick list. Somebody else reads it back in the office and types it into the finance system. Two people, one number, and a genuine question about whether it was a 4 or a 6.

Every cost below comes from that moment. Not from the software you are quoting, from the process you are quoting it against.

The four costs nobody puts in the budget

These are the costs a paper warehouse absorbs without ever naming them. They are also where the payback comes from, which is why they matter more than the licence line.

• Searching. People walking to look for stock the record says is somewhere else. It is the single largest block of wasted hours on most floors.
• Stock accuracy. Overselling, emergency purchasing and safety stock held purely because the number is not trusted.
• Transactional work stuck in the office. Data entry that could have been a scan on the floor, done a second time by someone paid to do something else.
• Rework. Wrong picks, credit notes, return shipping and the phone call that comes with each one.

Move the transaction to the floor

The saving is not that people work faster. It is that the transaction happens once, where the work happens, by the person already touching the item. The scan is the record.

That empties the office queue. Those people do not disappear — they stop rekeying and start doing work that brings money in. In an SME operation that is the largest line in the business case, and it never shows up in a licence comparison.

Budget bands in ZAR

We do not publish a price list, and you should be sceptical of anyone in this market who does — a warehouse quote that ignores your process is a number, not a price. What we can give you is the shape of the spend in R.

Three variables move it: how many people are on the floor at once, how many systems have to be connected, and how much of your process is genuinely unusual rather than merely undocumented.

• Platform: one flat fee. It does not move with your order count, your line count or your transaction volume.
• Concurrent scanner users: priced per concurrent device, not per named employee, so a second shift does not double the bill.
• Implementation: three scoped days for a straightforward SME warehouse, around twelve for SME+, twenty and up for enterprise scope.
• What is not on the bill: per-transaction fees, per-order fees, module unlock fees, and a support tier you have to buy to get answers.

Payback in months, not years

For an SME warehouse moving from paper to scanning, break-even typically lands around two months, with the full effect visible by six once the process has settled and the safety stock comes down.

Run the numbers on your own volumes — the calculator works in ZAR at the current ECB reference rate.

The line that quietly doubles a quote

Integration is where warehouse projects overrun. Connecting Sage 200 Evolution, Sage Business Cloud, SAP Business One, Xero and Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central is configuration for us, not a bespoke build billed by the day, and the same goes for carrier handover to The Courier Guy, Aramex South Africa, DSV, Fastway and PostNet.

Ask any vendor what a second system connection costs before you compare licence lines. That answer is usually worth more than the discount.

Questions to put to every vendor quoting you in South Africa

Ask these before the commercial conversation, not after. The answers move the three-year number far more than the headline licence does.

• Does the price change if our order volume doubles?
• Is every user a paid seat — priced per user, per month — or do you price concurrent devices?
• Which modules are excluded from this quote?
• Are we quoted in ZAR, or in another currency with the exchange risk on us?
• Is implementation a fixed scope in days, or time and materials?
• What does support cost, and what hours does it cover in our timezone?