Excited to share this with you, our IT team has been working hard in the background to get our tracking up to the next level.
SCS, to the best of our knowledge, was the first 3PL in NZ to offer a fully integrated web-enabled order and shipment track and trace solution in NZ, in the early 2000’s we built a web portal for Nest (an iconic NZ housewares store that sadly didn’t make it through the GFC) Dan wrote the programme on a flight to the UK for a wedding!
What was revolutionary at the time was the ability to not only view, in real-time, your order status, historical order info, inventory and historical transactional inventory reporting to balance your 3PL inventory with your internal IMS (Inventory Management System), this was and still is one of the biggest value adds SCS offers… we also took the shipment data and provided a link to some of our carriers. At that time Courier Post (now NZ Post) was the most advanced (still is in my view) so you could literally track an order in our portal from cradle to grave, from the moment it hit our WMS from your EDI message, you could then track the processing phases as it moved through the warehouse and then we would link you to the carrier and you could track it through their network from pick up to POD, you could do this all from within our portal however we ‘jumped’ you to the carriers tracking site.
Now its even BETTER.
Rather than link you off to the carrier’s site we now consume (via API’s) all of the carrier tracking info back in our SCS databases. All of the transit milestones Including the POD signatures.
Here’s why this is so cooooool!
1) Everything is now in one site, you don’t need to jump into another site to get the full story.
2) We have pulled in all of our major carriers (NZ Post, Kamush, Bascik, Daily Freight, Cargo Plus and Freight Plus) there isn’t a 3PL in NZ that does this.
3) Because we now ‘own’ the data, we can store it for longer i.e. 2 years, some of our carriers only store this for 3-6 months so it will be easy for us to go back and solve old disputes (historically we were at the mercy of the carrier and we would lose out)
4) But the BIGGEST advantage is because we now ‘own’ the data we can really up our KPI reporting, we have basic KPI reporting (which is more advanced than other 3PLs) already live in the Portal that focuses on 3PL performance – I did a blog on this a few months ago (view here – will open in a new tab) this functionality is already insane however what we will now be able to, by consuming all of our carrier performance milestones back into our databases, build the most advanced carrier reporting, this will be a world first, you’ll be able to use this data to demonstrate to your customers PROOF of our advanced performance to enhance your relationships but it also opens up opportunities to trigger e.g. text messages to your customers at any stage of the order process!!! This will enable you to add more value to your customers than any other provider within this paradigm.
We are SUPER excited. This is a big step up in our world to provide you with improved data to support your business and relationships with your customers.
Stay tuned!
