Business units

4.2.1 Business unit 1

Business unit 1 is the largest of all the business units participating in the research.

It has several warehouses in ten different locations. The biggest customers are from the fast moving consumer goods industry and the automotive industry.

Special needs discussed in the interviews: services included in the portfolio in the future will be assembling, VMI, home call, invoicing and tracking. Current report-ing includes inbound preadvice, loadreport-ing/routreport-ing advice, BBD/batch, inventory per location, picking situation reports per customer, efficiency reports and delivery ac-curacy. Daily reporting includes numerous customer based stock reporting, picking reporting directly to clients by e-mail and 30-50 detailed reports depending of ware-house needs. Critical functions for improving competitiveness are picking sequency and combining picking routes, ABC-analysis for placing goods, more product infor-mation to use in processes and batch tracking which increases visibility. The most important improvements to the current WMS are more flexibility to retail customer reports, printouts and picking procedures.

Important functionality:

• Possibility to save more details about goods (items), packaging, storage place, orders, clients, customers and suppliers

• Support for different strategies for put-away, blocking, picking optimization, retrieval

• Automatic functionality: suggestions from the system in relocations, alert functions, automatic plausibility check of delivery orders, reactions on short-ages, replenishment, instructions for return

• A wider range of key performance indicators

• Value added logistics functionality such as labeling, repacking, assembly, spare parts, production supply and sequencing

In all customer segments business unit 1 is expanding its 3PL capabilities. Internal operations are the most important part of the warehouse management system after general warehouse functionality. Out of all the customer industries the most features are needed in the fast moving consumer goods industry specific processes. Widest range of functionality is needed in: 3PL services, basic data and essential warehouse processes including order processing and picking, receiving, stocktaking, storage management and packing. Completely new functionality is needed in:

• VAL (sequencing, assembly),

• storage management (blocking, relocations),

• put-away (different placement strategies),

• packing and shipping (building of shipping units, loading),

• 3PL (multi-warehouse system, billing) and

• basic data (storage place information, item master data, units of measure).

4.2.2 Business unit 2

Business unit 2 specializes in cross-border supply chain management and offers spe-cial bonded warehouse services. The unit has operation in one location that is central for gaining entry to a larger market area. The unit serves mostly high-tech and consumer goods industries.

Special needs discussed in the interviews: Bonded warehousing functions are crucial for current and future customers. The WMS must be able to handle imported goods and a duty information systems integration would enable a faster customs clearance. Changing ownership of goods both imported and non-imported goods is an important operation in the warehouse. Other important functions in the WMS are tracking and tracing warehouse orders, transfer of shipment data to TMS, a web interface for clients and assembly jobs by employee must be able to monitor.

Important functionality:

• Third party logistics functionality (multi-warehouse, multi-client, invoicing, master data

• Value added logistics functionality: assembly, production supply and sequenc-ing

• Packing and shipping features such as empties handling, building of shipping units, transport devices, dock and yard management

Business needs for general warehouse operations are important excluding value added logistics features. VAL functionality is not considered as important for ba-sic operations as other warehouse processes but it is needed for customer specific processes. Internal and customer specific operations require a wide range of func-tionality specific for enabling third party logistics business. Some additional features are also needed in basic warehouse operations to enable internal operations. Com-pletely new features are needed in order processing. From the customer categories most features are needed in the industrial and high-tech sector specific processes.

However general warehouse and internal needs are emphasized in the results.

4.2.3 Business unit 3

Special needs discussed in the interviews: Daily reporting includes 20-25 different report which will double in the future. In the short term organic growth in the cur-rent business area is important but long term plans include expanding the business geographically which includes new types of clients. The most important customer segment is currently the fast moving consumer goods industry and serving this seg-ment is critical of the new system. In warehousing this means working mostly on unit level with short articles and long nomenclature. Cross-docking is typical for this industry and an important feature in the future WMS is cross-docking on unit level.

Important functionality:

• 3rd party logistics related features (Service pricing, multiple warehouses, multi-client capabilities, 3PL related master data)

• Transfer orders related features

• Wide data saving possibilities and data exchange with other systems (item master data, clients, customers and suppliers related data, ASN, goods receipt, order data)

• Manual operations like check digit input, order distribution to multiple ware-houses, order release

WMS needs concern improving the basic warehouse operations and internal opera-tions. Widening the WMS functionality for serving the needs of the FMCG industry is important. Widest functionality is needed in different blocking strategies, using the storage space more efficiently and resource planning. Completely new function-ality is enabling different units of measure.

4.2.4 Business unit 4

Business unit 4 participated only in the first survey because of problems in the sched-ule. However, there were informal discussions about the basic processes concerning the first survey. The current warehouse management system in the unit enables basic processes but not functions needed in logistics services so the most important functionality in addition to the basic processes is third party logistics functionality, for example multi-customer warehouses and billing features.

The results of the first survey include major new functionality in planning, stock-taking, storage management and value added logistics. Some new functionality is needed in basic data, order processing, packing and shipping.