How Do I Achieve End-to-End Supply Chain Visibility?
(3 min read)
Online shopping has determined our everyday life, what is not only featured by the current study of the E-Commerce Monitor 2020. It showed that more than 50% of surveyed people order online more than twice a month. But even more important is the fact that more than half of those surveyed people do not buy again from a company that does not deliver. Detailed and accurately forecasted shipment & delivery tracking is therefore one of the most important criteria for companies to improve customer experiences. This also increases the demands on the customer’s own logistics. End-to-end supply chain transparency requires a high level of connectivity between different processes and systems. The management of the last mile already begins in the warehouse.
The Efficiency of the Warehouse Processes Provides Information about the Accuracy of the Delivery Forecast
The challenge is to manage the increasing number of small individual orders with the support of logistical processes and automation, to track the process steps and to handle all information in one system. Only the tracking of the entire flow of materials can provide information whether the delivery dates contained in the order can still be met. If you operate a network, which transports packaged goods to a central dispatch center before delivery to the end customer, you naturally also want information on where the means of transport with the goods is located in road, sea, rail or air freight traffic in order to derive delays.
Our Smart Logistics: Plug & Play through Ready-Made Work Packages
With the assistance of our IoT solution “Logistics Bridge“, you can trace your processes and material within an SAP system at any time. By using a digital twin, we track all material activities from the internal material transport to the end customer delivery. In addition, the event-driven IoT application enables the automatic confirmation of material movements. Let’s take the material transport as an example. From a storage location to a central dispatch logistics center, the automatic goods receipt posting in SAP could take place when passing through the gateway during unloading, by automatically transmitting the status of the change of location via a self-developed interface. These are ready-made work packages for the inventory postings in SAP, which are hardware independent and can be used immediately without a lengthy implementation phase.
CEP Service Provider Connection Out of the Box
When it comes to parcel delivery, the CEP service providers naturally play an important role for the shipment order. Especially the service options offered by the carriers are a criterion here, which influences punctual pick-up and delivery. For a dynamic supply chain, customers need a system that meets their requirements for flexibility. For example, it should be possible to change the delivery service up to the latest possible point in time during the shipping process. it.x-press addresses exactly this need. In addition to the flexible selection and integration of more than 200 CEP and freight forwarding service providers, we integrate the required dynamic shipping processes into your SAP system. In this way, you can flexibly change the service provider and its services during the packaging process in SAP EWM and SAP ERP (ECC or SAP S/4HANA) in order to achieve the highest possible flexibility in the changeability of your deliveries.
100% Tracking – from Internal Material Transport to Package Delivery
In addition to the automatic tracking of inbound and outbound processes within an SAP interface, we also map customer requirements, such as automatic dispatch notification, within SAP.
By the way: What the example of our Logistics Bridge shows for logistics also applies to many other industrial sectors. On our website Enabling Innovations we show our other innovation cases.
Do you have any questions on this topic? Then you are welcome to contact me.
Transportation and Warehouse Management for the Digital Age