United States Cold Storage Inc., (USCS) headquartered at Cherry Hill, New Jersey is part of the US$5 billion Swire Group, owners of Cathay Pacific Airways and other properties worldwide.
USCS a major player in the public refrigerated warehousing market has been providing cold storage services to America 's food industry for almost eighty years. USCS owns and operates over 30 warehouses in eight states across the US , and maintains an integrated role in the worldwide distribution of fresh and frozen food products. USCS provides a strategically located network of modern warehousing and distribution facilities convenient to major food processing and marketing areas in Continental United States.
The warehouses and distribution facilities are specialized in handling, packing, labeling and inspection of all types of frozen foods via a network that spans transport media from sea and air to rail and road. |
| |
USCS had a Warehouse Management System (WMS) that was developed in-house. This WMS running on AS/400 platform automated all the operational activities in a warehouse. Each instance of WMS was capable of supporting operations for multiple warehouses. The warehouses were serviced by multiple AS/400 machines, which were networked via frame relay. In a warehouse, support for handling multiple accounts was also provided. The WMS had all the features required to support a warehouse reach operational excellence.
However the limitations of the existing system were:
- Non-EDI customers had to use phone / fax to communicate with USCS. USCS had to deploy increased number of customer service representatives.
- There was no automated order tracking, inventory status, in bounds and out bounds appointments etc. All information had to be tracked and communicated manually through phone / fax increasing the turnaround time as well as communication costs.
- Since operations were spread across US, there was no consolidated information available regarding the status of various orders / inventory etc across warehouses. This information had to be culled by communicating with individual warehouses.
- USCS employs transport operators to physically move goods from warehouse to customer/consignee locations. The offer to transport the material through the transport operators was controlled manually. The accept/reject offer from the transport operators was tracked manually and the turn around for finalization of the transport operator for moving a particular consignment was high.
|
| |
In answer to these operational difficulties Cognizant developed a web based extra-net solution to provide USCS' customers with facilities to:
- Inquire on real time integrated information on the inventory, receipts, orders and schedule of inbound and outbound shipment of all the goods in storage facilities.
- Enter and track orders through the web.
- Generate reports at various levels from individual warehouse to all warehouses in which the customer is doing business with. The reports are made available in HTML as well as excel downloadable format.
- A complete online tendering and tracking system for carriers to accept or reject loads of shipment, update delivery schedules and update shipment details
- A complete Order Tracking System, which has web front-end as well as AS/400 green screen front-end
- A complete security management system, which helps in defining logins, their access permissions, etc.
The project involves the integration of information that is distributed amongst the different AS/400 machines and providing one unified view to the customer. |
| |
 |
| |
USCS gained significantly after the implementation of the solution that was designed and implemented by Cognizant. The major benefits realized by USCS:
- Greater transparency and integrity of information flow to USCS's customers resulting in greater customer satisfaction and opportunity for higher revenue realization.
- Online order placement and real time order / inventory tracking through Internet resulting in reduced communication costs and optimum manpower utilization.
- Ability of USCS's customers to generate reports at various stages of consolidation (warehouse level / company level etc).
- Alert, notifications etc. automatically generated & transmitted through emails.
- This web-based B2B extranet solution will provide USCS customers with integrated up-to-date information on all logistics, operational and support systems regarding the inventory and status of goods in all of USCS' facilities. The system gives US Cold Storage customers and partner's real-time information over the web regarding service availability, account and order status, as well as order-entry, EDI, and other transactional capabilities.
To summarize, the benefits from the client's perspective are improved customer service, reduced expenses and increased revenue. |
| |
The Development Environment consists of AS/400, Window NT and Web browser. The software architecture for the system is divided into 3 layers: front-end, middleware and backend.
Front-end development environment comprises of html and java script. The front-end is developed for JavaScript enabled web browsers line IE 4.0 and above, Netscape 4.0 and above. Middleware development environment comprises of Java Sever Pages and Java Beans. The middleware comprises of Windows NT Server 4.0, MS IIS 4.0, Allaire's JRun Web application server and IBM AS/400 Java Toolkit.
The backend consists of multiple AS/400 out of which one of them (called the Application Server) is used for accesses from the middleware. The application server currently runs under OS/400 V4R4. For each web request, the application server connects to the respective remote AS/400s servicing the warehouse, gets the relevant data, consolidates the data and provides the response. Back end development environment comprises of SQLRPGLE and CLLE, RPGLE. Remote SQLs are used to access data from different AS/400s. |
|
 |
"We continue to deepen our relationship with Cognizant because they are team-oriented,
highly responsive, provide flexibility and scalability to quickly ramp up large
project teams, and have multiple competencies."
Tim Brennan,
IT Director,
US Cold Storage |
| |
| |
|