Function overview
A single map of the warehouse functions openWCS covers. Each card says plainly whether it is Built today or on the Roadmap — so you can tell what you can run now from what is designed but not yet implemented.
Foundations · Built today
The platform functions every flow leans on: designed processes, event-sourced stock, outbound allocation, the host integration surface, and access control. All implemented today.
Model goods-in, outbound and cycle-count flows on an embedded Flowable engine, deploy them, and have service tasks originate real WCS work — including the goods-in put-away delegate.
Real-time stock projected from an append-only transaction log: SKU- and location-scoped availability / ATP, reservations under a lock, idempotent and rebuildable.
Outbound pick-location allocation with UoM breakdown, multi-size cubing into shippers (largest-first, line-traceable), per-shipper dispatch labels, and batch picking.
One Host API for orders, ASNs, SKUs and adjustments in; confirmations out via cursor feed or webhooks; idempotent. SAP and Manhattan adapters translate native messages in.
Gateway JWT validation, per-endpoint role-based access on every service from a shared role→permission catalog, and Keycloak — all toggleable, so you start simple and lock down for production.
Station execution: present one stock HU and put-to-light fills many order destinations most-needed-first — the GTP batch. ORDER_LOCATION and PUT_WALL modes share one engine.
Browse schemas and tables and run SELECT-only queries against the running system, straight from the Administration screen. Read-only by construction: a guarded transaction, statement timeout and row caps.
In-app help on every screen, a GitHub wiki sync on every merge to main, plus a daily docs agent — keeping the README, architecture docs and this site in sync, with in-repo docs committed to main and recorded in git history.
An in-app AI chat that answers questions about your orders, transports, stock and handling units by calling the WCS's own read-only APIs — under your permissions, scoped to your warehouse, answering only from the results. Bring your own Anthropic API key.
The operator and management UI ships in English, German, French, Spanish and Chinese, with a per-user language preference each person sets and keeps. Few WCS platforms offer multiple languages out of the box: openWCS does, today, with no add-on.
Storage & movement · Built today
Storage and movement logic and the conveyor control plane — implemented in the engine. Follow a card for the deep dive.
A weighted, configurable put-away scorer places each SKU by velocity, lane, redundancy and aisle balance — with self-taught ABC velocity.
Min/max refills, opportunistic off-peak top-off to max, and direct-to-pick cross-docking when a forward face has headroom.
Vendor-neutral topology graph, per-scan next-hop pathfinding, loop limits, PLC controllers, and topology discovery from sniffed scan traffic.
Block-level put-away, re-slotting, in-aisle depth and dual-cycle behaviour, plus empty-HU management for shuttle / crane / AutoStore / AMR-GTP.
Present one stock HU and put-to-light fills many order destinations most-needed-first — the batch. ORDER_LOCATION and PUT_WALL modes share one engine.
Count tasks, blind and variance counts, reconciliation, at-station blind counting via the GTP console, and a standalone count screen — all working today.
The whole layout rendered live in the browser: equipment coloured by real-time state, totes replaying the actual scan trail, and storage fill at cell level. No SCADA add-on.
A Reporting section with five screens: scan quality with predictive error trends, 3D traffic and movement heatmaps, ASRS density with 14-day forecasts, per-SKU stock split, and inbound/outbound peak maps.
On the roadmap
These have foundations in the codebase but are not implemented end-to-end. They are framed as planned so you always know where the line is.
Open & vendor-neutral
openWCS is open source under AGPL-3.0. What's built is in the repo; what's roadmap is tracked in the open — no marketing fog.