Wednesday, September 10, 2008

RedPrairie enhances internationalized shipment capabilities in Transportation Management System (TMS)

Milwaukee, WI – RedPrairie Corporation, a world leading consumer driven optimization company, announced today a host of new features in its updated TMS release – built especially for international users. Additions to the program include ocean, rail, and air-based multi-modal transportation support, time-based transit service standards, and enhanced geocoding. The new features will allow transport by means other than roads, including barge and ferry travel over ocean or short sea, maximizing the most efficient transportation methods and allowing better transit time calculation, while lowering costs and environmental impact.

“Implementing a TMS that can be applied across not only state lines but international borders is a major hurdle for any large, expanding business,” says Erv Bluemner, RedPrairie Vice President of Product Strategy, “This release allows our customers to include differences across geopolitical boundaries with all of their logistics strategies. In the past, European executives have had difficulty finding a single system to manage shipments both domestically and across far-flung regions. Our new release enables global shipments in one system.”

The new release is especially sensitive to a host of complicating factors associated with international logistics, including time zone changes, support for single as well as multiple contract multi-modal shipment planning, and extended European mapping and distance calculations. These new features will enable intra-European movement optimization, and more flexible options for how to conduct those movements.

International shipping in and between regions without postal codes, such as areas within central China, has been a particularly difficult issue for manufacturers, but RedPrairie’s new release features global map and guide support, while allowing customers to encode regions made up of locations as broad as multiple states or as specific as given address IDs.

“While RedPrairie has long been known as a leader in providing domestic U.S. transportation solutions, as well as support for exports, this new release enables customers in Europe and Asia to optimize localized and international shipment as well,” says Bluemner, “Transportation management is always difficult for any manufacturer, distributor or third party logistics (3PL) provider. This enhanced system will ease many of the extra burdens associated with shipping product over international borders.”

The software also includes a range of new features to assist third party logistics (3PL) providers with billing, booking, and managing their services.

About RedPrairie Corporation


RedPrairie is a world leading consumer driven optimization company. Built on an advanced Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) developed over the past 15 years, the RedPrairie integrated suite of solutions offers on-demand capabilities to over 32,000 sites worldwide for many of the world’s largest companies.

RedPrairie’s E2e™ solutions synchronize people and products throughout the customer buying cycle to ensure goods reach the right place at the right time. At the point of sale, this means consumers have access to desired products and that the store is staffed with the right people to help them make their purchases. In the production cycle, it means suppliers and manufacturers time and synchronize shipments and production based on demand signals from the retailer. And in the back room of the store, it means having the least amount of inventory, solving the “last yard” problem of the retail supply chain.