Logistics IT Products

DHL's approach to Logistics IT is driven by delivering value and is based on a group-wide portfolio of products and services that is defined by our core services and sector solutions.

Broadly categorised by freight management, warehouse management, transportation management, supply chain event management and order management systems, our Logistics IT portfolio is governed by our global IT strategy:

• Work closely with sectors and customers to identify high value IT product needs
• Partner with leading IT vendors to provide leading IT product capability
• Make standard IT products available globally
• Provide managed IT product service

We work with a small number of leading application partners to ensure that all portfolio products meet our strict requirements around functionality and support.

Regional competency centres are responsible for the in-house product expertise to sell, implement, support and develop each product, ensuring that the product is always able to meet the needs of our customers, as well as our business.

All our IT products and services are deployed in a high availability, robust and scalable environment in the context of rigorous service management and certified support procedures.

Warehouse Management

Warehouse management systems (WMS) are required to manage a wide range of warehouse operations, delivering benefits around inventory control, labour efficiency, and order fulfilment service levels.

As a result, we work with a range of global WMS vendors to provide our customers with the most appropriate WMS to meet their complex inventory management needs.

These best-of-breed applications bring significant benefits to us and our customers:

• Improved inventory control
• Reduced inventory levels through shorter cycle times
• Reduced labour costs through process improvement
• Increased storage capacity through enhanced space management
• Increased customer service through improved inventory cycle times

Freight Management

Our global freight management systems allow customer service, operations and finance staff to accurately process consignments door to door in accordance with agreed service levels and pricing.

All data is shared globally and never re-keyed as consignments move between locations. Therefore a high degree of data integrity is maintained in our global database.

We understand our processes need to be seamlessly linked to our customers and carriers and our airfreight systems are integrated with those of our customers to receive orders and provide a wide range of data including tracking and billing information.

We are also integrated with airfreight carriers for booking, manifesting and status updates and with customs authorities around the world in support of our brokerage and compliance products. Through this integration, errors are minimised and productivity and transit times improved.

Our airfreight systems meet statutory requirements in all countries and are integrated with US governmental systems for security screening of export and inbound consignments.

Transportation Management

DHL's transport management systems (TMS) consider a customer's transport network in its entirety and provide solutions to:

• Reduce costs
• Increase efficiencies
• Optimise loads, vehicles and drivers

TMS control towers throughout Europe and the Americas manage the domestic and international transport requirements on behalf of a large number of our customers whose requirements range from UK deliveries to retailers through a complex European transport network, to the provision of a global multi-modal order fulfilment solution.

Supply Chain Management

Our three tier approach to supply chain visibility gives our customers access to a range of customised solutions. Public track and trace systems provide shipment visibility based on a range of search criteria in the forwarding area.

Our secure, customised visibility products start to introduce greater detail around order content, inventory, reporting and alerting, as well as bringing in information from other providers of third party logistics services.

Our value added visibility solutions incorporate greater integration with the customer for shipment booking, document preparation and productions and KPI reporting.

At this value added level, we have developed powerful supply chain event management tools, which automatically monitor events in the supply chain and notify customers and logistics professionals when potential problems are likely to occur.

With real-time visibility information from multiple operational and track and trace systems, customers can monitor/manage operational performance across the entire supply chain, covering both inventory in transit and inventory in the warehouse.

Our customers benefit from:

• Improving customer service through superior information
• Reducing costs through supply chain optimisation
• Increasing revenue through shorter lead times

Information Management

The management of information encompasses the total supply chain: taking demand and supply-based data to optimise inventory holdings and network design; using information from multiple IT applications to create documentation; storing and giving access to documentation across the Internet and providing reliable, timely and accurate information for management reporting and analysis.

This diverse range of requirements means that DHL must work with a number of different vendors across sectors, transportation modes and geographies to ensure that the most appropriate application is available to meet the needs of our operations and customers.

DHL's ability to deliver the right local application on a global basis linked to mainstream supply chain management and execution products offers significant benefits around IT investment, project delivery, service management and support. This integrated approach means that we are able to create customer-specific solutions from within our global portfolio, meeting the customer's individual needs in the context of our overall managed service.

Information Exchange

DHL's EDI Competence Centres allow rapid data exchange. The frequency is defined with the customer.

We have also developed standard XML APIs for our customer systems to connect to our backend systems. This allows real-time data exchange.

DHL is a member of a number of trade information exchange associations - including the automotive and electronics sectors.

Contact us

If you would like to know more about logistics solutions, please use our on-line contact form or speak to your regular DHL contact.