Solution offers order management, personalization capabilities to help streamline distribution for DTC, drop-ship retail
Waukesha, WI — April 15, 2004 — Supply chain technology provider RedPrairie this week took the wraps off a new suite of solutions designed to help meet the challenges of direct-to-consumer (DTC) retailers for both direct distribution and drop-ship retail environments.
The DTC suite includes the order management capabilities of the provider's DLx SourceRight, a user-configurable inventory sourcing and allocation component designed to provide network-wide visibility to orders and inventory to enable lowest cost, best service allocation and shipment, while balancing workflow.
Within the distribution center, the DTC suite employs picking and value-added-service capabilities that enable personalization of each order, with customized packaging and shipment, according to RedPrairie.
Since these orders typically require more manual effort to fulfill, the DTC suite has task management, labor planning and scheduling capabilities to help ensure maximum labor productivity is achieved while satisfying unique customer order parameters. As a result, RedPrairie asserted, the suite gives companies the ability to efficiently process mass customization for consumer orders.
The suite optionally includes small parcel shipment capabilities intended to reduce costs through best routing algorithms for zone skipping, less-than-truckload (LTL) consolidation, multi-stop routing and pool-point shipments. There are also capabilities for merge-in-transit and mixing center processing for more complex orders to help ensure that complete orders arrive at the customer when promised.
The suite also provides Web-based tools that customers can use, either directly or through customer service representatives, for order status, tracking and shipment tracing.
RedPrairie said it is offering this new DTC suite after working with various direct-to-consumer retailers to solve their unique challenges. As examples of its current DTC customers, RedPrairie cited Cingular Wireless, American Musical Supply, Bear Creek, Amazon.com and Swiss Colony.
"Direct-to-consumer retailers face special challenges satisfying the greatly varying order configuration, handling and delivery requests of consumers," said John Jazwiec with RedPrairie. "RedPrairie's DTC solution provides flexible sourcing, packaging, value-added-services and shipping processes DTC retailers need to meet these challenges."
