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North American team serving more than 150 customers across the United States and Canada. Scaling Operations The line between ecommerce and B2B order pro les has blurred to the point of irrelevance, Hagen says. A $10,000 seafood order now carries the same customer expectations as a retail package: speed, visibility, accuracy. Legacy systems, built for an earlier era of enterprise procurement, struggle to ex across both. CartonCloud runs warehouse and transport on one platform rather than two integrated ones—solving a common problem for small, frequent shipments, where the handoff from warehouse to carrier is where most of the friction and reconciliation error lives. That exibility shows up most concretely in onboarding. Where traditional WMS rollouts can stretch to 12 months, CartonCloud customers typically go live in days or weeks, largely because con guration lives with operators rather than buried in code or gated behind an IT team or vendor service desk. Hagen points to customers who are seeing 60% to 80% reductions in admin overhead, freeing staff to focus on growth or, in some cases, simply reclaiming time. On labor, Hagen pushes back against the assumption that optimization tools are the answer. “The most valuable labor tool in the WMS isn’t the labor module,” he says. “It’s every hour of admin or rework that you can delete before you even need to manage it.” He frames the real value in eliminating unmanaged paperwork and manual data entry before headcount ever becomes the bottleneck. The WMS helps move process knowledge out of a supervisor’s head and into the system itself so that newer staff can be productive faster. Unlocking AI Value Arti cial intelligence is the next step in that philosophy. CartonCloud already runs AI in production: turning unstructured
CartonCloud lets companies connect every part of their warehouse and transport management together in one platform for complete visibility and control.
customer paperwork, emailed orders, PDFs, and spreadsheets into clean, structured orders and letting users ask the system questions in plain language instead of building reports. His test is simple: “Does it do work a person had to do yesterday?” Behind that is a bigger shift. For 30 years the WMS has been a system of record. Hagen sees it becoming a system of operations: software that doesn’t just log what happened in the warehouse but also handles routine work (billing, data entry, exception handling) and passes judgment calls to a person. Because CartonCloud runs warehouse and transport on a single platform, its AI sees the whole ow from the rack to the dock door, context that point solutions can’t replicate. He’s direct about where the industry’s marketing has outrun reality. Fully autonomous physical optimization is still “more promise than practice,” he says, and operators are right to be skeptical of anyone claiming otherwise. “On the administrative side, though, the value is real today. That’s where a mid-market operator gets enterprise-grade leverage without an enterprise-grade headcount.” Hagen’s advice to operators evaluating any WMS: Nail down inventory depth requirements rst—traceability, expiry
“You shouldn’t be waiting six to 12 months to get time to value anymore,” he says. The bigger priority, in Hagen’s view, is who gets access to serious capability. “Within three years, the capability only a Manhattan or SAP customer can afford today will be expected by every serious operator, at mid-market prices, live in weeks,” he says. The question buyers should ask isn’t how big their company is but how sophisticated their operation is. “Plenty of 40-person 3PLs run more complex ful llment than a Fortune 500 DC,” Hagen says. “They’ve been stuck in the middle: too sophisticated for entry- level tools, but not about to sign up for a two-year enterprise implementation. That’s the gap we’re built for.” DATEX: Adapting to Variability Accommodating variability is key in WMS software. “The common thread we see across shippers and 3PLs isn’t any single pain point; it’s variability,” says Derek Armanious, chief engineering of cer at Datex. “Labor availability changes week to week, order pro les change season to season, and customer requirements change contract to contract.” Operations built for a stable state are becoming overextended—and that’s reshaping what shippers and third-party logistics providers expect from a WMS.
control, labeling—then prioritize con gurability and honest vendor partnerships over hype.
72 Inbound Logistics • September 2026
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