Technology & Logistics
The Effective Capture and Communication of Information in the Logistics Process
The flood of paper work required to support transportation logistics presents an opportunity for all the trading partners in the demand chain process.
Typically a company processes hundreds of orders per week and often the order fulfilment process is manual.
As a result, thousands of bills of lading, manifests and similar documents converge on a carrier daily. But carriers must process the documentation quickly and accurately to get the right goods delivered on time to the right consignee. Information about orders on paper documents must be read and interpreted by people. Manual keyboard data entry techniques are used to process this documentation. This system is slow and costly and results in a errors, that result in operational inefficiency.
Carriers and shippers have tried a number of solutions, such as EDI. However, most carriers receive less than five per cent of shipping documents through EDI. Furthermore, the most sophisticated EDI hardware does not guarantee accurate or fast transmissions. As well, the cost both for the EDI infrastructure is often prohibitive.
Parcel carriers have led the way in shipping systems. Their goal is twofold: Firstly, to provide shipping labels that will help move the freight through the carrier’s system, and to reduce or eliminate data entry at the carrier’s facility. The information captured on the system is transmitted two ways: Data is transmitted from the shipping system to the carrier’s host using a dedicated phone line. The second method is the “sneaker net,” which involves the downloading of data to a disk from a computer and then using this disk to upload information in another PC. The information is downloaded onto disks and uploaded back at the carrier terminal. Both processes present unique problems. The first is a requirement for a dedicated phone line. In the case of “sneaker’ net,” the integrity of the data is in question.
The opportunity: streamline the process by the effective capture, communication and processing of information. The reward: a competitive advantage.
One company working on this problem is Sameday Rightoway, an express freight company. Today, this company uses both EDI and shipping systems to help process more than 300,000 orders each month. However, they see an opportunity to improve the current process. Some of the key issues are:
After investigating the technologies available, Sameday is undertaking a program using Portable Data Files [PDF417] - more commonly know as 2D bar-coding.
Traditional linear bar codes are simply a key to a database. They are a series of letters or characters, usually limited to approximately 20, that must translated by a database to have any meaning. PDF417 is a machine-readable data file that can contain 1108 bytes or 1850 ASCII characters of information and even more data with compression techniques.
This express freight company’s supplier of its shipping systems is Scancode Logistics, which has incorporated PDF417 into the shipping label and manifest process. As a result, paper-based documents that travel with the goods have been transformed into machine-readable media. All the information relating to the parcel or consignment can travel together with the physical goods in machine-readable format. This facilitates the automatic transfer of all necessary data between computer systems. A low-cost scanner is all that is required.
By scanning the 2D bar code into their system this company has complete and accurate data capture. This reduces the cost of data capture and it assures data integrity. As a result, un-routable or misrouted shipments are reduced or eliminated.
Currently Sameday’s time for pick-ups is based on the time required to enter the data in relationship to the time its outbound schedules must depart to meet delivery commitments. It now takes approximately one minute to enter the shipping data. However, scanning in the data will allow Sameday to reduce entry time to a matter of seconds. The result: an extended pick-up window.
Because the information travels in a machine-readable format with the shipment, the real long-term benefit of PDF417 is the sharing of information with all parties in the demand chain.