Better facilitation for the flow of goods – The new release offers enhanced functionality to manage diverse distribution environments. Comments Tom Kozenski, RedPrairie® Vice President Product Strategy, “Supply chain operations have undergone tremendous changes in today’s consumer driven marketplace. Storage warehouses are being retooled as flow-through processing centres where inbound and outbound shipments are synchronised to optimise the inventory flow in a multi-channel order fulfilment operation. This agile movement of goods must be visible and efficient.”

Tighter integration between WMS and TMS – Planning and synchronisation of the movement of goods is shared between RedPrairie Warehouse Management (WMS) and Transportation Management (TMS) applications. The TMS can plan the sequence in which distribution orders are fulfilled by the WMS based on the most economical shipment plan meeting customer service requirements. The store shipment schedule is used by TMS to optimise routes and ensure that customer delivery agreements are met. The RedPrairie Collaboration Portal™ is used by carriers and suppliers to coordinate appointment scheduling within the WMS and TMS. For inbound processing, the system offers flexible assignment and movement of received inventory for pre-allocated distribution.

Improved recall and quality assurance capabilities - With all of the recent publicity on major recalls of everything from children’s toys to meats, quality assurance is a critical inbound activity. The RedPrairie release offers enhanced web-based QA / Recall capabilities to enable track-and-trace from the point of origin to the ultimate destination. Paired with RedPrairie’s new E²e™ Business Process Platform, these capabilities make one-button recalls a reality.

Integrated parcel manifesting - With the new release, RedPrairie has embedded its parcel manifesting system within WMS and TMS to provide certified least-cost shipping by all the major parcel carriers. It handles domestic and international shipments and provides shipment visibility to the customer’s door.

“With Parcel shipments becoming a larger percentage of transportation spend, it has increased the importance of parcel manifesting applications,” says Adrian Gonzalez, Director Logistics Executive Council for ARC Advisory Group. “It is an especially critical factor for sectors such as retail, service parts and direct to consumer.”

“This new solution further enables synchronization of the flow of goods and information from manufacturing to the store shelf. The seamless flow is critical in the transformation to demand-driven business operations where real-time collaboration between suppliers, distributors, third party logistics providers and retailers is the foundation for agile supply chain and replenishment processes,” says Mike Mayoras, CEO for RedPrairie.

RedPrairie’s new version of the supply chain suite is now available in general release, even in India,and is being implemented at many new client sites.

- End -