February 10, 2006

In today's fast and competitive B2B world, business customers expect more of 3PLs (Third-Party Logistics) providers than ever before, especially in the area of information and data management.

"We have a customer in Delphi, Michigan who uses our WMS (warehouse management system) as their sole inventory system," says Roger Oliver, IT Manager for Hanson Logistics, by way of example.

If there were one word to describe the benefit of the WMS, it might be intelligence. The examples that Oliver gives illustrate how the WMS makes the warehouse (and those who are following the movement of goods into, within, and out of it) smarter.

Say you're a customer who has particular questions about a shipment on its way to you.

"We do customized reporting," says Oliver. "You can find out what we've got, what condition it's in, it's age, and billing reports." This information can be delivered to the customer by fax or electronic data interchange (EDI), or the customer can look it up directly through the Web-based Provia interface.

That's one level of intelligence.

What about Hanson Logistics and its own warehouse employees? Two of its seven warehouses have a wireless scanning system that scans pallets and case labels.

This information goes straight into WMS without the intermediate step of keypunching. As long as those items are in the warehouse, Hanson Logistics can track them.

"It knows we are moving a pallet from a blast freezer to storage or between locations," says Oliver. "It scans every case, every pallet, captures IDs and characteristics like weight. It's reported to the customer with outgoing documentation."

There's even a way for the system to support the execution of business rules. Say you are a customer who is ordering a delivery of blueberries, and you have specific requirements for freshness.

"The scanning crew loads that information into their handhelds," says Oliver. "Later, when the scanners are docked, the customer can see that we filled the order with these lots, or we did these substitutions because of the shelf life and quality viability of product."

The business rule gets programmed into the handheld, the handheld tells the workers what to do, and then the handhelds report on what the workers have done. The WMS underlies this, and it also makes possible the Web-based reporting interface for customers.

It's an impressive demonstration of granularity and control, and it illustrates why WMS has the potential to make every warehouse smarter.

Source: Line 56