Cost to Serve Fulfillment:

The value of supply chain and logistics technology is well established. It permeates every corner of the supply chain, from automated storage and retrieval systems to telemetric trucks to RFID tags, producing enormous amounts of data. Yet with all this information, you and your network of trading partners and customers cannot pull all this data together in a valuable, single point of view of real-time data. Why is that single point of view (POV) essential? With a single POV of your supply chain events, you can make decisions based on what’s happening, as it happens and can gain clarity into true cost-to-serve.

Demands for frequent, mixed SKU orders to a nationwide network of DCs, coupled with fines for missed delivery windows, make some customers simply not profitable or considerably less profitable than others. You need to know your cost-to-serve, and not just big customers but all customers. Whether your objective is to reduce supply chain costs or improve on time, in full delivery, tracking your true cost-to-serve is mission-critical. Plus, you don’t want your staff pulled in every direction tracking down shipments when they need to be available for more strategic tasks.  

Determining cost-to-serve, or total landed costs, requires connecting all the dots in your supply chain. That may sound like an impossible task, but it offers a clear path to value if your trading partners are willing to collaborate (and they should be as part of your service agreement). A platform as a service (PaaS) solution such as the one offered by Activ Technologies provides a cloud-based platform to connect and integrate disparate data streams from all your trading partners into harmonious data sets from a technology standpoint. You can then leverage the analytical engines, data management tools, and dashboards to give you and your team visibility into what’s happening and use predictive analytics, alerts, and notifications to make better decisions.