The missing integration in your digital supply chain

In this blog: Businesses are investing heavily in ERP, WMS, e-commerce and automation. But if transportation is still managed as a separate final step, manual processes, data silos and unnecessary complexity emerge at precisely the point where goods need to leave the warehouse. 

The digital supply chain does not end when an order is registered in the ERP system or when the goods have been picked and packed in the warehouse. Yet this is often where a digital disconnect occurs.

Order data sits in one place, while the warehouse operates in another system and the carrier has its own portal. Labels and shipping documents need to be generated, but tracking data comes back in different formats. And employees end up moving information between systems, even though large parts of the process are otherwise automated.

The problem becomes even more apparent as the business grows: more warehouses, carriers, markets and delivery services mean more connections and more potential handovers between systems.

Read how 3PL Fulfilly scaled customers and carriers without increasing complexity.

That's why transportation and delivery should not be treated as an isolated activity that happens after the warehouse. It's part of the digital supply chain and should be integrated accordingly.

From order to delivery, without digital disconnects 

ERP, WMS, e-commerce and transport management systems perform different tasks:

• The ERP system may, for example, contain order, customer, product and financial data.

• A WMS manages physical warehouse processes such as picking and packing.

• The e-commerce or order management system handles the order and the customer's selected delivery option.

• And the transportation layer turns that information into the actual shipment: selecting and booking the carrier and service, generating labels and shipping documents, tracking the shipment and capturing subsequent delivery data.

But the challenge arises when information cannot move efficiently between these layers.

In an integrated setup, the necessary order and shipment data can, for example, be sent from the ERP or WMS to a shipping platform. Rules can then be applied to select the relevant carrier and service, book the shipment and produce labels and documents. The tracking number and status information can then be sent back to the systems where employees already work.

This means carrier connections and shipping rules do not necessarily have to be built and maintained separately in each individual ERP, WMS or e-commerce system.

Read more about how ERP and transportation can be integrated.

The WMS is a crucial link 

In the warehouse, integration becomes very tangible.

Imagine that an employee has completed an order in the WMS. If the transportation process sits alongside the warehouse process rather than being integrated with it, the next step may be to open a separate carrier portal, re-enter information, select a service and print a label.

With a WMS integration, the process can instead connect directly with picking and packing. Order data can be passed on automatically, and a scan or event in the WMS can, for example, trigger booking and label generation in the delivery management platform. The employee can continue working within the familiar warehouse flow while the transportation process is handled in the background.

This does more than reduce data re-entry - it also makes it easier to standardize processes across carriers.

That becomes important when the warehouse needs to handle more carriers or new markets. If every carrier requires its own separate workflow, complexity quickly increases. With a separate multi-carrier layer between the WMS and the carriers, the warehouse can operate using a more consistent flow while connections to individual carriers are managed centrally.

nShift currently supports integrations with WMS solutions including Blue Yonder, Apport, Ongoing, Infor WMS, NYCE.LOGIC and Reflex. See nShift's WMS integrations

The problem often lies between the systems 

It's not necessarily the individual systems that create inefficiency. An ERP system may work perfectly well. The same may be true of the company's WMS and the carriers' own solutions.

The problem arises in the handovers between them:

• A transportation planner copies data from one system to another.

• A tracking number has to be manually passed back to customer service.

• A new carrier requires yet another integration.

• A local rule exists only in the head of the employee who normally handles certain shipments.

The more warehouses, carriers, markets and transportation modes a business adds, the more these handovers multiply.

This is also why shipment volume alone does not tell you how complex a transportation operation is. A company with relatively few shipments can still face significant complexity if it works with many carriers, multiple locations, different transportation modes, customs requirements or customer-specific delivery windows.

One transportation layer between multiple systems and carriers 

One way to reduce complexity is to view delivery management as a shared integration and execution layer.

Instead of having each ERP, WMS or e-commerce system manage its carrier connections individually, the operational systems connect to a transportation layer that handles communication with carriers.

In principle, this creates a simpler setup:

ERP / OMS / e-commerce → WMS → delivery management → carriers

Data also moves in the opposite direction. Tracking events, delivery status and – depending on the integration – cost data can be fed back and used by teams such as warehouse operations, customer service, finance and transportation management.

This is an important distinction: digitalization is not just about sending data out of the business faster, it's also about getting useful data back.

When carriers' different status codes and events can be brought together into a more consistent data foundation, it becomes easier to create visibility across the carrier network, track shipments and analyse factors such as delivery performance and exceptions.

New carriers should not mean new processes 

One of the situations where the value of a connected architecture becomes particularly clear is when the business changes.

It could be a new market. An additional warehouse. A new carrier. A new ERP version. Or a new WMS.

If carrier logic is built directly into each individual business system, these changes can create extensive integration work. If carrier connections, labels and shipping rules instead sit within a separate transportation layer, parts of the transportation setup can remain in place even as the surrounding system landscape changes.

This applies, for example, during ERP migrations. Carrier agreements, shipping rules and label flows can remain within the transportation platform while the ERP-side connection changes. Similarly, a WMS can integrate with the transportation layer rather than having to maintain individual connections to a large number of carriers.

nShift's ecosystem includes more than 450 integrations across ERP, WMS and e-commerce systems, among others, as well as connections to more than 1,000 carriers. This doesn't mean that every business should use the same architecture, but it illustrates why the integration layer becomes increasingly important as complexity grows. Explore nShift's integration ecosystem

Find the manual handovers 

Businesses that want to assess how connected their digital supply chain really is can start somewhere very practical: follow a single order all the way through the process:

• Where is information entered more than once?

• Where does an employee have to switch systems?

• Where do carrier-specific workflows arise?

• Where does someone have to retrieve a status manually?

• And where does the process depend on a particular employee knowing what the next step is?

These handovers are often where the biggest opportunities for automation can be found.

The goal is not integration for integration's sake, but rather to enter data as few times as possible, apply rules automatically and give employees the information they need within the systems where they already work.

Because the digital supply chain is only truly connected when the digital flow follows the goods all the way through, including after they leave the warehouse.