Large Wholesale Distributor
Reducing the Costs of Shipping
Industry: Office Products Retailing
& Distribution
Focus: Strategy Consulting, Custom Application
Development
The leading distributor of business products
offers more than 35,000 items from 500 manufacturers. They
serve more than 20,000 resellers doing business via retail,
mail order, other distributors, and the Web. The key component
of their operating strategy is fulfillment excellence: getting
the right products to the right customers in the right package
at the right time and tracking the entire process. To meet
this strategy, they have established 77 distribution centers
in the United States and Canada allowing them to reach nearly
every reseller in North America within 24 hours. The Logistics
Department utilized a proprietary system to capture shipping
information and to integrate it with the firm’s existing
billing system.
The proprietary system being used posed two issues. First,
the system supported only one carrier, UPS, and the Logistics
Department needed the ability to support multiple carriers
to get the best rates. Second, it was not Y2K compliant. Although
the vendor provided an upgrade path, it was very expensive.
Other shipping management packages were evaluated, but did
not provide an interface to the company’s billing system.
The firm decided to purchase a shipping management product
from TanData to provide rates for multiple carriers. It also
determined it would develop a custom Carrier Interface solution
that would be platform independent to integrate into their
billing system. In addition, they wanted the Carrier Interface
to be easy to manage so they required a distributed object
oriented solution. The firm did not have tools or experience
creating distributed, platform independent systems so Genisys
was selected to lead the development of this solution. Initially,
Genisys defined the standards for Java applications, selected
the modeling, development, and testing tools, introduced object
oriented analysis and design and provided technical direction
and leadership to the firm’s personnel. Genisys then
designed the system architecture and developed the initial
Carrier Interface framework for UPS from which other carrier
frameworks were developed. The architecture supplied the mainframe-based
DB2 billing application with the manifested shipping data
from the TanData Rate Server. In addition, Genisys converted
a Carton Maintenance application from a Microsoft environment
to J2EE using Java Server Pages and Servlets on Apache Tomcat
and Enterprise Java Beans on JBoss. The data remained in SQL
Server.
The Logistics Department was able to reduce the costs of their
shipments by utilizing multiple carriers to get the most beneficial
rates. In addition, they received a customized solution that
was Y2K compliant. Finally, the firm’s technical personnel
had the framework and foundation to develop distributed, object
oriented, platform independent solutions.
Microsoft Windows 2000, Microsoft IIS,
Microsoft Visual Studio 6.0, Microsoft SQL Server 2000,
Analysis Services, MDX Queries, Active Server Pages,
JavaScript
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