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Often, knowledge of the status of an order or product is as mission critical as physical control of the product itself. With the tools and knowledge engines at the core of our IT solutions, progress of a shipment, including annunciation of missed timetables, is available at the click of a mouse. Itineraries are built based on standard, or custom, routings and progress measured against this planned itinerary. Because product in motion is ‘over the horizon’, it is critical in today’s supply chain world to not only effectively manage direct transportation costs through efficient routings, but also balance the cost of transportation against the holistic cost of one critical transportation element ‘event’ cascading inventory pileup and customer service failure. Active planning and monitoring, coupled with annunciators flashing critical events, (missed sailings, excess container dwell time, customs holds) is necessary in today’s supply chain management. Our tools and processes deliver the framework for our collaborative transportation partners to electronically update shipment status so there is a ‘one stop shop’ using our visibility tools displayed on your desktop.
 Beyond transportation visibility, the complex supply chain of today is truly a network of providers working in some form of direct, or indirect, collaboration. Elements of this network include forwarders, ocean, air or land carriers, intermediate 3PL providers and, today, 4PL providers who provide a management or intellectual tools. Whether product is in motion or at rest in a terminal, or a distribution center available for fulfillment, knowledge capture, including status update, IN REAL TIME, is mission critical. Our tools provide our customers with real time information, not just past tense static reporting. Even if we are an intermediate step in your supply chain, we can aggregate live date regarding status for you. Some of the other solutions which offer this require all of the pieces of the supply chain to use the same applications. Our visibility solution allows us to share access to the visibility database – enabling low tech but physically excellent partners to manually update information if that’s a requirement, and also integrates with any high technology messaging mechanism in the marketplace – allowing us to span the entire pool of logistics providers in our visibility offering.
- As Supply Chain and inventory management processes mature, we are experiencing the phenomenon of an exploding volume of smaller unit sized transactions. It is very easy when focusing on direct logistics costs and aggressive balance sheet management strategies to implement supply chain tactics that are successful on the surface, but are a net negative due to the ‘administrative transactional costs’ exceeding net transactional savings. A case in point is a manufacturer that shifted from self warehousing of inbound materials to implement a 3PL managed VMI program. Rather than implement this ‘revolutionary’ change in their supply chain, accept significant gains today, followed by ‘evolutionary’ changes over a period of time as the model was tested and improved from practice, the game plan from day one was of case pulls with returns to the vendor at the end of the production day. The net result was a significant jump in transactional costs (pick, pull, ship, invoice, pick, return, return to stock, credit) only to do it again on the next shift. The transactional costs jumped exponentially as the process as proposed was buried in ‘administrivia’. It is essential to consider the overall whole cost when viewing a successful supply chain. The less that systems are integrated, (the BEST case is to function collaboratively), the higher the likelihood that solid supply chain tactics yield less than optimal results due to the sheer costs of the intervention and ‘off process’ costs associated with the tactics. Advances in web infrastructure and messaging technologies allow your systems and ours to communicate transactional data on a routine basis. For example, if we are managing outbound product for distribution we would interactively enable our systems to routinely poll your released orders and post them from your queue to our warehouse management system, triggering the pull and wave fulfillment desired. Whether through EDI or XML, our processes become a natural extension of your extended enterprise.
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