Benefits of Automated Dock Door Scheduling

Automating your dock door scheduling delivers impressive benefits, but did you know there are other "hidden" benefits too? In this short interview Chris Bennett discusses a few of the obvious and the not so obvious benefits of dock door scheduling. To learn more about this solution following the following link to download our brochure. http://go.onenetwork.com/dock-door-scheduling-solution Alternatively contact Chris directly on cbennett@onenetwork.com What is Dock-Door Scheduling? Dock-Door scheduling is one of the key services provided by One Network as part of the Intelligent Logistics solutions suite. It automates the scheduling process, and streamlines other key processes related to pickup, delivery, and receiving. The service also integrates with buying and distribution workflows across your supply network, giving you advance visibility of future capacity challenges. How does it Work? Dock-Door Scheduling uses a proprietary scheduling engine that considers your business rules and exceptions before offering partners a choice of appropriate time slots. You and all your trading partners can then easily choose appointment times with an internet browser or smart phone. The service also provides real time visibility into your current and future dock needs. For example, users can see upcoming appointments whilst flagging any potential production or customer service issues, meaning you can proactively manage problems before they become crises. What are the key aspects of the solution? The key aspects are Automatic shipment prioritisation, This enables shipping and receiving departments to understand the criticality of shipments based on the demand for the related products; meaning that during peak capacity times the most critical shipments will automatically receive appointments first, while lower priority shipments will be scheduled for days or times when capacity is not constrained. The second is that it enables you to model your assets and include best practices across your entire network. This will not only help you model business rules for shipping and receiving products at your own organization’s assets for example distribution centres, buildings, dock doors, but those of your entire network of trading partners as well. Collaborating with partners in this way ensures they will find it easy to embrace online appointment scheduling and follow your warehouses’ rules for arranging receiving and shipping. The upside is that your carriers, suppliers, and client partners will efficiently schedule your dock doors at their convenience, freeing up your staff for more important tasks which saves time, energy, and money. What else? Dock-door scheduling also includes scorecarding and compliance features. Because the system captures critical times and variance, it provides the critical components for a “charge back” mechanism for noncompliance, the service also records data such as origin, carrier, and other details that can be used to enable prepaid, collect, or hybrid programs. What makes One Network dock-door scheduling so different to other tools? I would have to say its flexibility and scalability. It can be used to schedule any load to be delivered to any specific point at an appointed time, because One Network freely makes available developer tools via its Developer Network, you’ll have the ability to customize the existing solution for business problems that are truly novel. The other big difference is the ability of the service to leverage data and workflows from across your supply network. To give just one example, although it is common for brand owners or vendors to have multiple sources for the same product, this information is usually lost when product is shipped to their customers downstream. Yet there is a great deal of value in understanding where this product originated. Suppose that the material is being shipped pre-paid. Capturing the “ship from” address can help you calibrate the freight allowance, or even convert these shipments to collect—saving money. Or consider the event of a quality problem. For example: a grocery retailer that buys spinach from a supplier that sources from multiple farms can quickly identify the specific source of contamination in the event of a recall by tying the shipment and product inventory to a lot number, or a serial number, capturing this information for each shipment, will enabling you to take appropriate action if needed. What are the proven benefits? Aside from the increased visibility, there’s improved efficiency, increased asset capacity utilization, decreased rates from carriers, compliance benchmarking metrics, access to historical data, controlled freight that provides scope for optimization