shipping software

[ZippyDan]

background:

business that takes telephone orders (or website orders) and enters them into an obscure (nearly proprietary) order management system (based on a microsoft sql database)

currently this results in a work process something like this:

1. order created in order system
2. pick list printed
3. shipment picked and packed and marked as "complete" in the order system
4. data is exported to FedEx Shipmanager which the current system supports directly (or entered manually into Endicia) and labels are printed
5. match labels to boxes

what the company is telling me they want is a shipping system that

1. prints the label with the pick list
2. prints a return label automatically

this would reduce the work process to something like this

1. order created in order system
2. ?? magic happens with new shipping program
3. pick list and shipping label printed from new shipping program
4. shipment is picked and packed and labeled and done

an example they pointed me to is www.trueship.com, but i have yet to investigate how feasible it would be to integrate that with the current ordering system. there are many other details and hurdles and complications i have to consider, but i was wondering if anyone out there might have experience with a particular shipping software or similar situation and could provide some recommendations. thanks.

 

[Edgy]

2 Questions:

Does your order management system include each product(s) gross packaged weight & dimension information per every product item you sell?

And is there a standardized rule/logic at the Warehouse on how to pack multiple item orders (i.e., do they ever combine multiple small items into 1 box etc.,)?

Reason I ask is unless above 2 things are KNOWN at time of pick list, no software in the world is gonna be able to print shipping labels.

Without total weight (actual or dimensional) and total number of shipping cartons, how you gonna print shipping labels (FedEx, UPS, USPS, whatever)...

Most businesses print the pick slips --> pick items --> package items (for final total carton count) --> weigh the final carton(s).

This is all because there is no reliable weight/dimension info and variable packaging standards that stress efficiency (combining small items into few cartons) over standardization.

 

[alent1234]

what's the current software? a lot of these are basic functionality and you have to code a lot yourself before you can use it

 

[ZippyDan]

2 Questions:

Does your order management system include each product(s) gross packaged weight & dimension information per every product item you sell?

And is there a standardized rule/logic at the Warehouse on how to pack multiple item orders (i.e., do they ever combine multiple small items into 1 box etc.,)?

Reason I ask is unless above 2 things are KNOWN at time of pick list, no software in the world is gonna be able to print shipping labels.

Without total weight (actual or dimensional) and total number of shipping cartons, how you gonna print shipping labels (FedEx, UPS, USPS, whatever)...

Most businesses print the pick slips --> pick items --> package items (for final total carton count) --> weigh the final carton(s).

This is all because there is no reliable weight/dimension info and variable packaging standards that stress efficiency (combining small items into few cartons) over standardization.

Yes we have weights for all of our items and all of our items are roughly the same size packaged. The weight info is already in the database.

what's the current software? a lot of these are basic functionality and you have to code a lot yourself before you can use it

The current software is something obscure and no longer supported. Let's just say I do have direct access to the database, but I do not have access to the source code for the UI.

 

[Edgy]

I was not involved at developer level but planning and conceptual level at my past company to find most efficient solutions to integrate our ERP with Warehousing.

From what I remember - it was easy enough per our developer (in house) with minor customization to pass on critical shipping data from our ERP directly to UPS/FedEx system without the need for additional software solution layer such as one you linked to (trueship). For this, you wouldn't need to alter UI, just need to find and pass the necessary data from your current system database to carriers' shipping system.

All they did was pass on few data such as #of carton(s), weight per carton (actual or dimensional depending on which is greater), our reference number (order#), our customer's reference number (PO#) while retrieving and saving carrier tracking number into our ERP.

As I remember it, our developer advised that UPS and FedEx were more than happy enough to help with our customization development as we were fairly large volume customer.

Our work was much more complicated including real time freight charge/cost estimates at time of order taking to sell freight (which included all carrier shipping zones/charges per weight based on destination zip) and having to deal with well over 50K SKUs all varying in sizes leading to unpredictable consolidation shipment packaging...

But if all items are same size and consolidation ship packaging isn't presenting a problematic variable, then I would suggest contacting the carriers to see if they can point you in the right direction on how to pass values to their shipping system to automate these tasks. It might be worth a try - my developers made such task seem fairly effortless back when I was in charge of it...

 

[ZippyDan]

I was not involved at developer level but planning and conceptual level at my past company to find most efficient solutions to integrate our ERP with Warehousing.

From what I remember - it was easy enough per our developer (in house) with minor customization to pass on critical shipping data from our ERP directly to UPS/FedEx system without the need for additional software solution layer such as one you linked to (trueship). For this, you wouldn't need to alter UI, just need to find and pass the necessary data from your current system database to carriers' shipping system.

All they did was pass on few data such as #of carton(s), weight per carton (actual or dimensional depending on which is greater), our reference number (order#), our customer's reference number (PO#) while retrieving and saving carrier tracking number into our ERP.

As I remember it, our developer advised that UPS and FedEx were more than happy enough to help with our customization development as we were fairly large volume customer.

Our work was much more complicated including real time freight charge/cost estimates at time of order taking to sell freight (which included all carrier shipping zones/charges per weight based on destination zip) and having to deal with well over 50K SKUs all varying in sizes leading to unpredictable consolidation shipment packaging...

But if all items are same size and consolidation ship packaging isn't presenting a problematic variable, then I would suggest contacting the carriers to see if they can point you in the right direction on how to pass values to their shipping system to automate these tasks. It might be worth a try - my developers made such task seem fairly effortless back when I was in charge of it...

we already pass data to FedEx Shipmanager. what they want to do is print the shipping label in the picking stage instead of after the packing stage. all of the data to print a label is ready at the picking stage, so they think that printing the pick list and label together will save paper and time (there is no need to match labels to packed boxes later) and reduce errors (less chance of matching the wrong label to the wrong box). the current ordering system does not support passing data to FedEx in the picking stage....

 

[alent1234]

you are probably better off dumping the old system and finding a complete replacement

 

[Edgy]

I see.

We've had our ERP picklist printing to trigger UPS or FedEx label printing on its system automatically by passing data and print trigger but we decided not to combine the picklist and shipping label on one printout.

Reason for this as I remember was because shipping labels from UPS/FedEx were provided free from carriers and implementing a new consolidated picking list/shipping label would add cost (would have to switch to a stickered paper type and our picking list averaged around 3-4 pages per order even for 1 consolidated shipping carton).

As it were, our warehousing were required to do thorough review of order contents with picking list, consolidated carton packaging and counts, and shipping labels even if we combined everything into 1 printout since our standard average orders were around 10-30 items per order anyways. So there was no particular advantage in efficiency to combine.

When we held our discussion of potentially combining the picklist with shipping labels - we deemed the carrier approved shipping label barcode printing as the primary obstacle for our developers (not impossible but definitely not as easy as other stuff).

I think one of the potentially "easy" solution discussed were to interface with carrier online label printing - to capture the image result into our ERP to incorporate into our picking list printout.

Otherwise, collaborated development with carrier to meet their barcode standardization requirements was needed for any in-house development.

Last option was 3rd party software already developed according to approved standards.

I would have gone for option 1 or 2 as we had creative developers and for 1 time cost with minimal maintenance with our well-established ERP. Option 3 to us would have been a rather a patch fix with potential long-term headache.