Staying at home all day waiting for a package to be delivered are long gone. Nowadays, you receive a message at least a day upfront containing the estimated time of arrival, way before the actual delivery. In this way, the transporter and retailer want to inform us as good as possible. However, we do not only want to be informed about our orders in our personal lives. Your customers want to be informed about their orders as well. So, when you use third-party transporters to deliver your packages, how do you make sure you and your customers constantly have the latest transport status? With the help of the new functionality in 3PL Dynamics, you and your customers can get insights into the latest status, without being saddled up with extra work.

The most recent status automatically available on your order

When outsourcing the transportation of orders, you do want to keep a close eye on the whereabouts of the package, and whether it is delivered. In 3PL Dynamics, you can now directly see this on the shipment order. Using an automatically generated message given by Transsmart, the transporter automatically sends the latest status to your system. There, you can find the latest status on the field ‘status code’ in the tab ‘Document package’. In this way, you immediately know where in the process the package is.

Create templates for your transporters

Transporters can work with different status codes or descriptions. Of course, descriptions as ‘package delivered’ or ‘driver on route’ are often used. However, every transporter has different codes that represent a specific status of the shipment. For example, packages delivered by the Dutch organization PostNL can have 120 different status codes. In the field ‘Status template code’ you determine what template is linked to the transporter. In this way, you make sure that every transporter can send the correct status to your system.

Directly see what status your packages have

The template that you have linked to the transporter consists of all the statuses a shipment can have. These are described by status codes. In the example below, you see that the outbound is given status template ‘POSTNL_PNL’, with status code ‘J05’. For this transporter, status code ‘J05’ means ‘driver on route’.

Set up your status template

Before being able to see what status your package has in the process of the shipping agent, like in the image above, you have to complete your status template with the matching status codes. In this example, status template ‘POSTNL_PNL’ has been created. To this template, you link all the possible status codes and descriptions the package can have when transported by this party. By doing so, you know exactly what code stands for what description for that transporter. In the example below, you can see that ‘S15’ is linked to the description ‘Package delivered’ and ‘B10’ stands for ‘Package lost’. When all possible codes are captured in the template, it is ready to use.

Prevent lost packages

Besides receiving the latest transportation status, and therefore, always being up-to-date, the different statuses are automatically captured in the status log. In this log, you can see when which status transition has taken place. This means that you cannot only follow the status of your packages in real-time, but you can also see the previous steps in the process of your delivery. With this information, you can, for example, inform your customers that the package will be delivered soon or confront the shipping agency on possible delays in the process.

Start using package status

Do you want to learn more about the possibilities of the new functionality? Or do you want to implement Document Package Status to your own WMS? Mail to info@elevate-it.be, our consultants are glad to help.