Competitive Advantage for Fulfillment Logistics Businesses

The last fulfillment solution you’ll have to buy

Fulfillment services, unfortunately, have become commodities. Competition won’t let companies charge more for fulfillment services, so improved profitability will come from adding more customers, selling a more comprehensive portfolio of services, and keeping costs down.  So, when you are considering a fulfillment solution to manage your operations, look for one that makes it easy to provide differentiated services and whose visibility becomes a selling point for your clients.

Jagged Peak’sEDGE is a fulfillment process management platform that improves profitability. It does so by helping you increase your top line while reducing operating expenses.

Easing prospects past the fears of losing control

For your prospective customers, fear of losing control of the order fulfillment processes, and of losing the business as a result, is one of the biggest impediments to outsourcing. EDGE helps you win business by helping your prospects overcome their fears by making the entire fulfillment process visible--in real time. It gives them the confidence you can do the job because they have greater visibility into operational performance than they have with their own systems today.

With EDGE, your customers can log in every day at any time, and review how well you’re performing. With such operational transparency, you have information to ensure you meet each SLA, and your customers can be confident they have the information they need to hold you accountable. EDGE puts customers and your warehouse staff on the same page with real-time information. Everybody can see the same things.

Managing complex multi-client operations with ease

Today, customers expect fulfillment providers to have systems that will support them in the way they want. Since each customer has its own business processes and decision rules, it’s difficult for most order management systems to support a multi-client environment.

EDGE’s original architecture was built to support multiple clients, each with its own SLAs and order management rules. It allows tremendous flexibility in how it takes orders, enabling you to establish unique decision rules for each customer. One may allow backorders, but another may not. Some may allow expedited deliveries and charge for them, but others may opt for USPS delivery only. EDGE maintains the integrity of each customer’s data, so there is no co-mingling of information. It also contains rich analytics that detail operational results for each client and provides aggregated totals so your managers can optimize operations.

Do customers take orders from multiple channels? No problem. EDGE consolidates and manages orders from multiple sources, such as the Internet, call centers, direct sales force or EDI, in multiple formats--XML, EDI, e-mail, Excel, .CSV, file based, or web direct. It fills orders for products, literature, digital downloads, and promotional items. EDGE also integrates nicely with WMS systems, including those from SAP, J.D Edwards, Manhattan, Red Prairie, EXE, and High Jump. 

EDGE lets you configure order management decision rules for each customer, but at the same time it standardizes your internal fulfillment operations processes. Each customer can have different order capture methods and rules, but your fulfillment operations will receive fully executable, perfect orders that they handle using the same standardized methods. That means the overhead of special processing requirements fade away, along with their costs.

Expanding revenue by solving more customer problems

The more problems you solve for your customers, the more they’ll look to you for answers. EDGE is a web-based, scalable, configurable application that gives fulfillment companies competitive advantage by letting them sell services not found supported by any other order management systems. 

With EDGE, your customers can extend state-of-the-art web portals to any constituency that needs them, whether they are customers, distributors, resellers, or groups of their employees. Different portals can be deployed for each channel, and customers can apply different order management decision rules to each one.

EDGE posts product catalogs, manages pricing, promotions, discounts, and processes payments. It can control the order cycle from the moment customers place orders on the Internet or through a call center. EDGE also executes least-cost routing for shipping, and can manage your customer’s returns and reverse logistics as well.

This additional functionality gives you important selling points--with EDGE as your platform, customers can deliver better customer service and simplify their computing environments when they adopt the full range of EDGE capabilities.

Drop your expense line through operational efficiencies

A fulfillment operation that executes the same business processes for all customers is far less costly less than one that uses separate processes for each one. While EDGE gives a great deal of latitude in configuring order taking business rules, it drives consistency in fulfillment operations. Orders are perfectly executable when they reach the warehouse so there are no costly production interruptions for problems like stockouts or bad shipping addresses.

EDGE standardizes all aspects of the operations environment, including inventory and order processing, across multiple warehouses. You can use the same standard processes to fill orders for products, literature, promotional items, or any other item you ship. This consistency dramatically reduces the need for one-off processes and “specialists” assigned to handle the exceptions non-standard processes generate. This significantly reduces overhead costs.