A greenfield warehouse programme usually arrives with a team on the integrator's side and a steering committee on yours, and a gap in the middle where the work actually happens. The integrator will configure, build, test and hand over. What they will not do, because they cannot, is decide how your warehouse should run, sign off that your product data is true, release your best supervisors from the floor, or say no to your own sales director when a sensible request arrives. Those four jobs are yours, and on a site with no history and no incumbent system, they are heavier than on any brownfield programme.
The process owner.
One person, senior enough to make a decision in the room and live with it, who owns how the warehouse will operate. Not a committee and not the project manager. The process owner sits in every design workshop, answers "how should this work" without taking it away, and is the person the integrator escalates to when two parts of the business want different things. On a greenfield site this person is often the future site manager, which is ideal, provided they are appointed early enough to do the design and not just inherit it.
Time: most of their week during design, a couple of days a week through build and test, and full time in the last month.
The data owner.
The person who signs off that every master data object is true: the pallet quantity, the carton weight, the bin that actually holds the product. Not the person who types it, the person who stands behind it. The integrator builds the structures; this person owns what goes in them and is accountable when the first putaway sends a pallet to a bin it does not fit. We have written about why this seat matters most in Master data for a warehouse that does not exist yet.
Time: a solid block during data build, then a day a week through test, then a week of tape measure and scale before labelling.
The supervisors, released.
Testing and training on a first WMS have to be done by the people who will run the shift, on the floor, on the product. That means supervisors and lead hands off the existing operation for real blocks of time, and someone covering their shift while they are gone. The programme that does not budget this backfill gets supervisors who attend testing between phone calls and learn the system on the first Monday live. The floor then does what it always does with a system it does not trust: it routes around it.
Time: two to three supervisors, half their week through UAT, most of it through readiness. Budget the backfill on the existing site explicitly.
The scope holder.
Someone senior enough to say no to the business. Scope creep on a greenfield build never looks like creep; it looks like a sensible request from a sensible person. One more report. One custom screen for a case that happens twice a year. A Z program to handle what a large customer asked for last week. Each is defensible alone. The scope holder's job is to weigh each one against ten years of maintaining it, and to hold the line that the eighty-five per cent of the warehouse that is not your competitive advantage runs on standard EWM. Usually this is the sponsor. It has to be someone the sales director cannot go around.
Time: little, but at the right moments, and with real authority.
What an empty seat costs.
No process owner and the design never closes; the build inherits every unmade decision and the calendar absorbs them. No data owner and the first week live is spent fixing data on the racking with a label gun. No supervisors released and the system goes live with operators who have never used it, which is how labour drift starts. No scope holder and the build ends with a system SAP no longer supports cleanly and an upgrade path that costs more every year.
The integrator brings the system. You bring the warehouse. If nobody on your side has the time and the authority to bring it, the integrator will build the warehouse they imagine, and your floor will spend a decade working around it.
How Luminar approaches the team.
In the first fortnight of a greenfield engagement we name the four seats, ask who is in each one, and write down how much of their week the programme will take. Where a seat is empty we say so to the sponsor before the build starts, not after. We are not a substitute for any of the four, and we will not pretend to be. What we do is sit beside them: a senior consultant who has held each of those seats on other floors, and who stays on this one through go-live.