Consumers’ growing preference for online shopping resulted in unprecedented increases in order fulfillment and returns shipments in 2012. The numbers will increase in 2013 as the e-commerce & m-commerce (mobile commerce) movement is only revving up. With this rise in online orders, fulfillment and reverse logistics processes have never been as important for retail companies than they are as we enter the new year.
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Thanks to Gray Thursday, Black Friday and Cyber Monday, online retail (“E-tail”) sales have hit record highs in the US this holiday season. FedEx is expecting to ship a record 19 Million packages today alone (12/10/12). UPS has predicted that they will ship over 527 million packages in the period between Thanksgiving and Christmas, as compared to 480 million packages total in 2011. The increase in shipping volume is shocking, and it’s only going up.
So what’s the impact? Both carriers and E-tailers are beginning to realize that, if they intend on maintaining the same levels of customer satisfaction and quality control as shipping volumes increase, the current partnership dynamic will be changing in a big way.
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When the Blue Harbors team is asked to connect a customer’s SAP system to carriers such as FedEx and UPS, the project often kicks off without much drama. We start working with the carriers to get the accounts established; we customize SAP and load the necessary mapping rules to support web services; and so on. So far, so good.
There is an ever growing list of carriers, transportation companies, freight brokers and forwarders, and even government agencies that facilitate shipping by supporting electronic communication. The depth of services supported varies from carrier to carrier, but most have the following capabilities:
One of the more tedious aspects to configuring XSI is setting up each carrier (Express Delivery Company) in the XSI Cockpit (VTRC). UPS and Fedex used to provide a mechanism for loading much of the data via SAP Business Connector (see http://www.sdn.sap.com/irj/scn/index?rid=/library/uuid/1b17c690-0201-0010-17b1-a362e172a094), however this is no longer supported by either carrier or by SAP.
From time to time parcel carriers such as FedEx and UPS update the format of their shipping labels. The FedEx notices below may look familiar. This puts pressure on you to vigilantly follow pending changes from your Carriers and stay on top of implementing updates in your system. Depending on type of shipping solution deployed in your environment, you may also be responsible for
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