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Contents 
Introduction
Nurses streamline with tablets
Picking up tips from from NYK
Fighting fire with wireless
Eight points for wireless success |
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NYK Logistics provides third-party logistics (3PL) services from seven locations across the country, specialising in consumer electronics and whitegoods. Its main customers are large companies from the USA, Europe and Japan. The company also offers a full range of 3PL services from warehousing to national distribution, including value-added 3PL such as national reverse logistics, overflow inventory, and spare parts.
NYK Logistics holds the bulk of the stock for customers, which calls for integration between A MARC warehouse management system (WMS) used by NYK Logistics and the customer's ERP or WMS. This was originally achieved by customising the warehouse management system, IT manager Wayne Robinson says, but that strategy was abandoned because it made upgrades more difficult and was unsupported by software vendor MARC Global.
The company now uses vanilla installations of packages wherever possible, relying on Mercator middleware to handle the interfacing. "It give us a more seamless integration," Robinson says. He says it allows NYK Logistics to effectively become part of its client's organisation. This can be seen by the lack of training requirements for either company to access data held by the other. NYK Logistics and its customers exchange data in batches at least every 20 minutes. In some cases the update interval is as brief as two minutes, which is close enough to real time for practical purposes.
A typical workflow is that an order arrives from a customer, and MARC issues picking instructions to warehouse staff via WLAN to their Symbol portable data terminals or wearable scanning system. Greater accuracy is obtained with scanners compared with entering codes manually -- a recent stocktake at one warehouse revealed a discrepancy of just AU$187 out of AU$5 million in stock.
The picking information flows directly into the WMS, allowing the progress of an order to be followed at line-item level. The successful implementation of this feature at NYK Logistics Australia is being studied by other parts of the company and may be used as a model internationally.
The customer's system is notified once picking is complete, at which time it replies with a transport confirmation. This triggers the transfer of the job from MARC to NYK Logistics' transport system, which manages the consignment through to the posting of a scanned image of the proof-of-delivery note on a tracking Web site accessible only by NYK's customers.
The transport system also complies with Coles Myer's and Woolworth's delivery requirements, including EDI notification. This approach allows customers to track progress from the time an order is placed right through to delivery. The Web site is typically used by sales teams tracing orders or checking stock levels, with other information being obtained using their ERP or WMS.
"About 12 months ago, the market saw this integration as a differentiation from our competitors," Robinson says, but it is now considered a baseline feature.
Plans are in progress to equip the trucks with wireless scanners that will log the goods on and off, and possibly capture receiver's signatures electronically. This data will be transferred to the transport system when the truck returns to the warehouse, allowing the tracking site to be updated within a few hours of delivery rather a day or two with the current paper-based process. A possible enhancement involves GPRS connectivity, allowing deliveries to be logged in real time.
XML is used for all integrations. "It's made things a lot simpler," Robinson says. "It allows us to use our systems in the most efficient manner without having to customise the customer's system or rely solely on their system -- again increasing efficiencies."
Take the customers who use SAP, which has its own XML interface. New customers with a limited product range can be brought online in two to four weeks, though it can be a six- to nine-month project for large customers running it.
Robinson says one customer is in the process of moving from an old WMS to SAP. NYK Logistics has been closely involved with this project and is already benefiting from more efficient integration. "We are effectively a native part of the ERP system for the warehouse," Robinson says. This efficiency also means data can be exchanged every two minutes rather than every 20. "It's really live," he says.
Robinson counsels his peers to spend extra time working with customers, not only with their technical staff but particularly with senior executives in order to manage their expectations. If they only become involved at the last minute there is a risk they will either ask for something that hasn't been included in the plan or they'll be dissatisfied with the result. He also recommends modifying data to suit the applications at each end rather than customising the software, and using the relevant standards.
In addition to the truck-based scanners, Robinson's agenda for the year ahead includes improving the integration between MARC and NYK Logistics' financial system to remove the manual processes currently required, and moving the Mercator middleware from a Windows 2003 Server to the AIX-based system currently running MARC and Oracle 8 (an upgrade to 9 is also planned) to simplify the transfer of data between MARC and Mercator.
