Co-operative Clothing - Tracking imports from production to receipt - how low cost systems are now delivering the goods

Lack of visibility across the import / export supply chain leads to lack of control, inefficiency and waste.

This affects importers and distributors - within sectors such as apparel, domestic appliances, industrial equipment, cosmetics and toiletries. For instance a UK company can place production orders on a factory in the Far East, and then have little visibility of the status of that order in terms of quantity made, in terms of container loading and in terms of despatch and transit. Problems are further exacerbated when the shipping container is received and takes hours or in some cases days to unload, to check, and to put away the stock. This problem of course isn't just related to geography, it can apply to a manufacturing plant around the corner from its customer.

To solve this problem ATMS developed its Global Track RemLab remote labelling and tracking module. The work was piloted with Cooperative Clothing, based in the North East of England, with its suppliers in Bangladesh, China and Lithuania.

The system works by sending details of the Coop's orders electronically to the overseas manufacturing facility. Information sent can include details of the full order and then details of each call off / despatch and export request.

The overseas manufacturer then produces labels for each carton or unit produced. Each label has a unique bar code ID number against which is held details of the carton contents - eg SKU, order reference, quantity, batch code and so on. The bar code is to the international GS1 standard and can be a 1D or 2D bar code.

Labels are produced on a near real time basis meaning that production information can be reported on a near real time basis back to the Coop. Conformance information including weights and quantities can be recorded against the unique label ID.

Cartons can then be scanned into shipping containers, providing an electronic ASN (advanced shipping note) and container manifest. This provides the Coop with exact and timely information of what has been shipped, how it has been packed and loaded and what container it is in.

At the Coop's warehouse in Washington, Tyne and Wear the task of unloading a container becomes significantly faster and more accurate. The individually labelled and identified cartons are unloaded and scanned, the ATMS warehouse management system there guides the operative where to put the item - either in the optimum stock location or cross docked straight to the despatch bay.

The solution is multi lingual. In association with the overseas academics and students at Aston University, ATMS spent time ensuring that the system was easy to use across multiple languages and cultures. A further challenge was ensuring that the system could work in environments where the Internet connectivity was limited and spasmodic and where IT skills and equipment were basic.

The solution presently runs on Cooperative Clothing's own IT hardware but has been designed so that it can run on the 'Cloud' as a hosted solution. The system is designed to use Internet connectivity, including 3G / gprs mobile communications.

GlobalTrack is now being extended to provide remote stock control and tracking, again this is applicable to shipping containers. This module centres around the use of the latest mobile hand held computers with in-built mobile phone Internet connections. This means that zero IT infrastructure is required making the module ideal for the control of remote or temporary warehouses, open storage yards, unmanned stores, control of inventory at customer or supplier sites.