Our purpose-built Transload module is designed for 3PLs with large, templatized deployments, is streamlined for efficiency, yet ensures the data from every scan, receipt, and product touch is captured within the system.
Most WMS vendors push their cross-docking functionality as a solution for a Transload operation. At MacGregor Partners, we recognize the difference and developed a highly flexible, configurable, and efficient Transload Module for Blue Yonder WMS to ensure your operation has the traceability necessary to guarantee accuracy, without sacrificing speed.
While most WMS products can provide the functionality necessary to operate a Transload facility, it is far too cumbersome, time-consuming, and restrictive operationally. Our solution stitches together standard WMS functionality in a way that ensures there is limited to no new functionality created. Instead, standard functionality is elegantly pulled together and automated to remove unnecessary and cumbersome steps that impede the operation’s ability to move product quickly and ultimately meet contractual and financial needs.
Our Transload deployment model was built for 3PLs with large templatized deployments where consistency, supportability, and upgradeability are of paramount importance. This solution does not impact the standard workflows and processes leveraged by the rest of the organization and WMS template. It bolts onto an existing template cleanly with policy controls to enable and disable, integration transactions that may be leveraged or not, and specific RF-based workflows separate from the standard to preserve functionality and user experience between the two both during implementation and within future upgrades.
This solution leverages all the standard product routines necessary to ensure every scan of a barcode, every receipt of a carton, and every time product is touched systemically, it is tracked. This provides the operation and management with the necessary data points required to have intelligent conversations with their customers about the process, avoid fines, and differentiate themselves both in the sales cycle as well as post-implementation.
Talk to us at MacGregor Partners to take the first step toward that reality.
The logistics Transload business is often conflated with cross-docking within the WMS space. This results in confusion, incorrect configuration, and frustration within the design phase of a Transload implementation. Unlike WMS cross-docking functionality, which is often employed as an opportunistic function for ‘just in time’ inbound product in a traditional storage facility, a typical Transload facility begins the day empty and ends the day empty, as product is ‘swung’ from inbound containers directly onto an alternate transportation mode – typically TL, LTL, or rail. This second mode transports various product from multiple inbound containers to a distribution center, consolidator, or even potentially a retail store.
This is the first step in breaking down large shipments of a product type into quantities ready for ingestion into specific segments of a client’s US-based supply chain and inventory network. Given the work with ocean containers and the general lack of stored product, this is a very manual, labor-intensive physical process.
Cartons, boxes, and product is typically floor loaded in the containers and must be stripped and either palletized before loading on the outbound mode, or floor loaded in the outbound mode as well. As such, the ability for a transload facility to generate profit is inextricably linked to their ability to quickly unload and reload freight accurately, while overcoming any exceptions that would otherwise slow them down.
The number of keystrokes within any RF process, the ease of access to information during the receiving and sortation process, the ability to quickly resolve time-intensive exceptions, as well as the ability to keep up with a very high volume flow is of paramount importance. WMS solution delivered to a transload facility must provide this level of flexibility, speed, information, and the accuracy that any world-class transload facility requires. In our experience, the success of a transload solution is predicated on the ability to correctly balance the need for accuracy, structure, and process with the need for speed and flexibility required for a transload operation to maintain profitability.
