Solutions for Third Party Logistics (3PL)

An integrated multi-carrier shipping system that helps reduce shipping costs by allowing customers to rate shop between different carriers. It improves reliability by allowing you to track every shipment and maintain key performance metrics to make sure your shipping process isn't syphoning money out of your business. Rules and regulations from the major carriers (FedEx, UPS, USPS) are in a constant state of flux, LTL rates are all over the map and customer expectations continue to expand in today's fast-paced global business climate HighJump Ship allows you to maximize cost savings by leveraging carrier selection with the multi-carrier rating At the heart of any multi-carrier shipping system is the rating engine. HighJump Ship's server is designed for high volume, reliable shipping and comprehensive carrier compliance - with the flexibility to scale from a single workstation to an enterprise level solution with multiple servers, load balancing and high availability to meet even the most advanced requirements.

A resource scheduling and appointment planning solution is a dock door and load scheduling system that supports your management of dock doors, material handling, equipment, labor resources and inbound and outbound shipments. With this solution you can:

• schedule inbound and outbound loads for a given time at a given door in order to make the best possible use of your facilities
• set up recurring appointments on a daily, weekly, monthly or yearly basis
• determine daily workloads and predict future work loads
• develop standards for loading and unloading that allow you to improve work load planning
• centralize access of this information to all system users

A scheduler needs to be fully integrated with your 3PL specific WMS and so when you update your appointment information, a record is automatically created in the Time-Stamping Block to reflect the appointment's activity.

A comprehensive solution supports several methods of order creation:

• EDI
• Manual Entry
• Spreadsheet upload
• Customer entered (e-Vista web portal tool)

An enterprise 3PL solution offers a well-documented set of tools/programs to empower you to transfer data from a legacy solution or for uploading data for new customers using our standard programs. The standard data load tools support the loading of:

• Item (product codes)
• Item aliases
• Customers
• Consignees (Destination)
• Shippers
• Carriers
• Inventory
• Locations

Picking substitution allows RF operators to pick product other than the allocated product on the order line. It is designed to achieve faster picking and increased productivity for the warehouse by allowing operators to pick the most accessible product in a given location or area without sacrificing FIFO or other picking requirements.

Some 3PL providers prefer to use inventory levels for tracking purposes, while others opt for inventory attributes at the item level.
With tracking by inventory level, the usual four-level setup is style/color/size/LPN. With tracking by inventory attribute, only one inventory level - UPC code - is required; color, size and style are attached at the item level as inventory attributes.

Tracking by inventory level offers more reporting options than does tracking by inventory attributes. You can choose from dozens of inventory reports showing exact counts and subtotals for each style, color and size in your warehouse. The same is true of your inventory look-up programs; you can query by style, color and size and see exact counts and locations for each inventory level.

Tracking by inventory level also offers more flexible billing; you can bill at any inventory level and your customer will see a charge for each style, color or size shipped out of the warehouse. With tracking by inventory attribute, on the other hand, you can only bill by level 1 or UPC code and style, color or size information will not appear on your invoices.

A good 3PL solution should support overflow isolators. That is, when you receive product and all locations in the primary isolator zone for that product are full, product should be directed to the first overflow isolator. If the first overflow isolator is full, product should be directed to the second overflow isolator (if any). You should be able to define multiple overflow isolators for the same item and specify the sequence in which the software will query isolator zones in search of empty locations. Another "must have" option for isolator zones is the ability to specify whether or not an exact match of product and location isolators is required when selecting put-away locations. The four basic options are:

• ignore isolator codes
• use only exact match isolator code
• use any overflow isolator code
• use any isolator code other than exact match or overflows

Isolator zones serve two key functions in any WMS during directed put-away:

They allow you to keep certain products separate from each other within the same area. For example, you keep both fish and cheese in your cooler area but for obvious reasons you do not want both products sitting side by side in the same location or adjacent locations. Isolator zones allow you to keep both products separate from each other.

They allow you to keep similar product together. When similar product is kept together, you avoid a situation where product is dispersed in numerous locations in your warehouse and as a consequence is time-consuming and expensive to pick.

So what are the "must have" options for isolator zones that any 3PL solution should offer? First and foremost, isolator zones should be user-defined based on the particular needs of your warehouse. You could divide up your warehouse by customer: customer A, customer B and all other customers. Alternatively, you could divide up your warehouse by product: fish, cheese and all other products. Or you could divide up your warehouse by product velocity: meat fast-moving, meat medium moving and meat slow-moving.

Voice-activated picking - or as it is sometimes called "hands-free, eyes free picking" - can offer significant improvements in accuracy and productivity that paper-based or RF-terminal-based picking can never match.

So what should the 3PL operator look for when considering a voice-activated solution? First and foremost is flexibility. That is, the ability to define different sets of voice-activated picking rules for different customers, carriers, consignees, items, orders, locations and warehouses.

Other "must have" features of a robust voice-activated system allow you to define:

• whether or not the operator requests work or the system assigns it automatically
• which inventory level(s) the operator will hear for each pick
• whether or not the operator will be prompted with the delivery location
• which message or messages will be read out to the RF operator for each assignment
• whether or not you want the operator to read back the inventory level as confirmation and the minimum number of characters that must be read out
• whether or not a count back is activated and the rules to follow when the inventory count by the operator does not match the on hand quantity

A good voice-activated picking solution should support manual check digits for each location in your WMS. Check digits are alternate location codes used whenever the actual location code is too long to be read out by the operator for each pick.

Ideally you should be able to define multiple check digits for the same location and be able to schedule them by day of the week. For example, use check digit 1 on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays and check digit 2 on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays.

This is designed to avoid cheating; that is, the operator remembers the check digit and doesn't need to go to the correct pick location.