Cycle Labs Partners with Longbow Advantage
Longbow Advantage and Cycle Labs recently announced their partnership in Boston at the 2nd Annual Rebus Users conference, NOW 2022.
We sat down with Josh Owen, Co-founder and CEO of Cycle Labs, and Ryan Uhlenkamp, SVP of Strategic Alliances at Longbow Advantage, to talk about the benefits of this partnership for Rebus customers and how Cycle Labs can reduce risk for WMS implementations and the benefits of integrating continuous testing with Rebus real-time warehouse visibility.
Q – How do Rebus and Cycle Labs work together to reduce risk in system implementations?
Josh: “Well, I think the best Cycle [Labs] deployment is when you’re partnered with someone who just has deep expertise in what we would call the ‘system under test.’ In this case, the WMS, or warehouse Management System.
When you take the depth of knowledge around implementing Blue Yonder WMS and other WMS systems that the Longbow team has, and you combine Cycle into that equation, we equip them to do the things that they already know how to do, but to do it with a leaner approach, a higher level of quality, and a faster time-to-value.”
Ryan: “I think it’s a clear differentiator for us to be able to show up with an automated testing solution in our back pocket as part of an implementation.
It helps de-risk those already complex WMS implementations for our customers, but also provides a level of repeatability and scalability as you start to think about rollouts and continuous improvements, being able to run those tests and have the confidence that what you’re deploying is not going to disrupt your operation. It’s a game-changer for us.
One of the things that differentiates Longbow is roughly 60 percent of our people come from operations, 3PL, and from the customer side [of the supply chain]. So we understand the operation side and bring software into that, and I think that’s a very big benefit for our customers.
When we start to talk through what a WMS can do in an operation, it comes from a place where people understand and have done that before.”
Q – What capabilities are unlocked by integrating the Rebus and Cycle Labs platforms?
Josh: “I think Rebus is a fantastic data platform. My hope is that we can find a way to make sure that the insights provided to Rebus customers can then be evaluated, simulated, and emulated with Cycle.”
Ryan: “I think the opportunities are to start using some of the things that Cycle can do to simulate and compare and give readouts to customers about potential options.
For example, there are opportunities to look at what your automated mobile robot strategies could be and run it with some of the Cycle tests and compare that to the performance actuals with humans that we would have in Rebus.
Rebus has the opportunity to be a bit of a front end for Cycle. To provide some of that visibility.”
Q – How have you provided value to mutual customers??
Josh: “I know that we have a number of customers that are using both Rebus as a platform and Cycle as a testing solution. And I think some of the best results we’ve seen is whenever our customers then use Cycle for performance testing.
So assessing scalability—actually running ‘Day in the Life’ style testing and understanding where the thresholds of these systems fall apart.
Ryan: “I think at its core, what we’ve seen successfully with some customers already is why we wanted to do this together. Because I think it should really be in every implementation. There is a huge difference in confidence that you can bring into very difficult implementations.”
Rebus® is the only real-time warehouse execution platform purpose-built to help leaders manage their shift while it’s happening. Learn more about The Rebus Platform here.
Cycle Labs is a leading software and services company in the enterprise test automation space. Learn more about Cycle Labs at cyclelabs.io.
