When you produce your own custom-made products, these often also need to be transported on a specially designed transport item. Think for example of cabinets, doors and kitchen (tops). These are valuable cargo carriers and you do not want to lose them. Yet it happens too often that the load carriers get lost and organizations are forced to make or buy new ones. Read here how to track and manage your customized carts and load carriers.
Loss of valuable carts
The problem that several organizations with customized load carriers run into is that these load carriers get lost. At the end of the year, you no longer have the same amount of load carriers as at the beginning of the year. When drawing up the balance sheet, you are confronted with this every year: the high cost of returnable transport items. Losses of load carriers generate unnecessary costs that you can avoid by having insight into the numbers of your load carriers at each location.
Tracking your tailor-made transport items with IoT
When you know how many returnable transport items you have at each location and how many returns you can expect, you won’t lose sight of your load carriers anytime soon. By using the Internet of Things (IoT) you can track your valuable carts. Deli Home, a manufacturer of custom wood products, also uses the Internet of Things to track their specially designed transportation assets. By knowing how much of the available transport fleet is at customers’ premises or empty in storage, Deli Home can ship orders without delay. By automatically sending this data to the online packaging platform TrackOnline, Deli Home can see exactly where the various reusable wooden folding crates are and whether the numbers are sufficient at specific locations.
Integration of current software
Chances are that your retail organization already works with certain software for order entry, such as AFAS. In this software, all orders are entered and there is a clear overview of where the orders should be transported to. This gives you an overview of where the orders are going, but you have no clear insight into the location and numbers of the load carriers on which the products are transported.
Returnable transport items often remain at customers where the products have been delivered. Eventually the customer has to return the custom-made transport items. This sometimes leads to discussions about the actual return of the carts and the numbers involved. For you, this can endanger the delivery process of other products. When you don’t have enough returnable assets available to transport the products, the delivery process stops or there is a delay in the delivery of other products. This, in turn, causes dissatisfied customers. You can avoid delays or stops in the delivery process by having real-time insight into the location and numbers of your specially designed transport items. By creating a connection with your current ERP system and TrackOnline, all orders are automatically imported.
Real-time insight into your carts
In our online returnable asset management platform, you can see exactly which and how many carts are at each location. Through the connection with your own ERP system and TrackOnline, orders are automatically placed in TrackOnline and you don’t have to enter them manually. For each customer and/or location you can see the balance of the various types of returnable assets. From within the platform, you can easily send an automatic balance adjustment of the RTI’s to your customers. This way, everyone is informed, discussions are prevented and everyone knows exactly where what is.
To find out more about TrackOnline and what it can do for your organization, contact by email, download the brochure or visit the retail page.
Source: https://trackonline.com/en/