One primary contributing factor to the failings of the new economy initiatives is the inability of today’s fulfillment infrastructure to cope with the demands and dynamics of the new economy marketplace, the e-marketplace. Indeed, inventory visibility is now cited as one of the key elements of successful fulfillment execution along a supply chain. With inventory visibility, inventory carrying costs can be reduced, stock-out eliminated, warehouse space reduced and delivery predictability improved.

ShipNTrack.com believes supply chain fulfillment is very dependent on logistics services and that the spotlight on logistics excellence will be pushed more and more into the limelight. “We believe that enabling supply chain fulfillment to serve marketplaces will increasingly be a dominant theme and focus for the next 5 years”, says ShipNTrack.com’s CEO, David Wong. “As a builder of e-business solutions to enable players in the logistics, warehousing and fulfillment value chain to meet the challenges of supply chain fulfillment, we are introducing an inventory management solution and organizing a workshop for the logistics community to ensure today’s players will continue to remain relevant and secure a role with the advent of e-business and globalisation. For example, we are seeing more and more outsourcing of fulfillment services so that firms can concentrate in their core competencies. We see this as the beginning of supply chain collaboration where each partner in the supply chain will concentrate on what they do best.”

Logistics Business Development Manager, Yong Chee Kee further echoes, “As surely the e-marketplace is being reigned in by fulfillment issues, the current fulfillment service providers and infrastructure re being pressured to re-invent and innovate in order to meet the demands of these future e-marketplaces. More significantly, traditional businesses are beginning to discover and learning how to tap the powers of ICT to create supply chain competitive advantage, if they have not done so already.”

The first step to realizing inventory visibility is to have accurate and up to date inventory data on hand. Fulfillment challenges will necessitate visibility of inventory right down to the exact location/pallet/storage cell while up to date may well be close to real time, depending on the operational demands of the situation. To serve this need, a robust and execution type of application, i.e. a warehouse management system (WMS), is a prerequisite.

Secondly, the information must be disseminated to all the relevant community members in the supply chain if collaboration is to be successful. This requires the WMS to also have wide, secured reach to all the collaborative members, sometimes on a regional and global basis. Whilst private networks historically serve such a purpose, today’s demands that the visibility channel be ubiquitous and cost effective means that interfaces to the Internet is increasingly important.

In conjunction with the launch of ShipNTrack’s inventory management solution, e-HUB, a workshop for the logistics community themed ‘e-Logistics: Enabling Supply Chain Collaboration’ is held.

About e-HUB
e-HUB is an inventory management system designed to provide inventory visibility to meet the challenges of today and tomorrow’s supply chain demands. Based on the best-of-breed EXceed 4000 series warehouse management system, e-HUB includes propriety developed Virtual Inventory Management System (VIMS) that allows it to provide secured Internet inventory visibility. This secured Internet visibility of inventory information enables supply chain fulfillment collaboration with both upstream (e.g. suppliers) and downstream members (e.g. customers).

e-HUB is particularly attractive to the logistics community which comprises of SMEs to the larger, total logistics service providers because it can be deployed as an ASP model or in the more traditional client-server mode. With these two deployment models, e-HUB can cater to a variety of business needs and investment constraints. This is possible owing to the unique pricing structure of the ASP model that leverages on the utility concept to provide clients with “application on tap” through the ISDN platform.

Under the ASP model, logistics service providers stand to gain immensely and have piece of mind using e-HUB because not only is Exceed functionally powerful, proven and used by companies with revenues in excess of RM1 00 million, the ASP deployment model will now bring similar automation benefits to 2nd and 3rd tier logistics companies by lowering the cost of entry to a fraction of a client-server implementation. “Bringing the fruit lower for more to enjoy” is how CEO, David Wong sums up e-HUB. Another positive facet of the ASP model is that clients are protected from technology obsoletion because the ASP service automatically entitles them to version upgrades.

ShipNTrack.com, an IBM e-incubatee, is the partner of EXE Technologies for the ASP deployment of the Exceed inventory management system in Asia Pacific.

About SHIP’nTRACK
ShipnTrack integrates people, processes and technology to enable online buying and fulfillment, helping e-commerce operators to streamline their supply chain process to reduce cycle time, improve profitability and sustain competitive advantage. Through an Application Service Provider (ASP) model, ShipnTrack helps its domain communities by playing the roles of organizer and enabler to facilitate fulfillment activities of participants; namely the online sellers, e-shippers, e-marketplaces and logistic service providers.

ShipnTrack application services will provide customers with an automated end-to-end fulfillment from buy button to doorstep. This encompasses inventory management, order processing, on-line payment to fulfillment that includes “pick, pack and ship” services, door-to-door delivery, return management and real-time tracking services.

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