Packaging registration made easier in these 4 steps | PackControl
Registration of reusable packaging: it’s hard to keep it easy. With data in multiple systems and spreadsheets (and a lot of information in your head!) insight and overview often turn out to involve a lot of searching. Yet, it only takes a few steps to truly simplify your packaging registration.
What's the use of a packaging registration system? Usually, it's to enable you, your colleagues and your manager to gain insight into (one of) the following data:
Your ERP system and WMS are often unable to process the complete dataset, information quickly ends up scattered across the company, fragmented into incoherent pieces. The result: guesswork. What quantities of which items do you have in stock? What was dispatched when? Which shipments are planned and who is responsible for transport and costs? Are the correct amounts settled with pooling companies and counterparties?
You can structure all such information and get more insight. It will make your reusable packaging registration more complete and faster and will give you a better grip of reusable packaging costs. The 4 steps below will help you make a good start structuring your reusable packaging management system.
Packaging management often develops step by step. As the company grows, data are kept in more and more separate spreadsheets, documents and systems. It therefore makes sense to regularly evaluate which data you really need and where they should be recorded.
Every department has its own data requirements and often different systems are used to store information. Get together with your colleagues to identify the different needs and take a critical look at all data processing regarding reusable packaging. You can eliminate unnecessary duplicate tasks and take steps towards streamlining your reusable packaging management.
When making an inventory of your packaging administration, you will often find out that similar information is used by several departments, who each store these data in separate files.
Every time such data are processed manually, the risk of (human) error increases. With the right software, data from spreadsheets, ERP, WMS, CRM and e.g. balance overviews of pooling companies, can now be automatically exchanged and processed. That saves time and reduces the error rate.
Packaging flows between your company, suppliers and customers often follows a set structure. Still, such structures often differ per counterparty, depending on agreements with customers, suppliers, pooling companies and carriers. Who is responsible for what and at which time? Who bears which costs? How, when and with whom do you settle deposits?
Once you have a clear understanding of data sources and different needs, you can start building your system. PackControl lets you automate all of your packaging administration.
Agreements and exceptions exist for specific items, locations, amounts, carriers, customers and all kinds of other things. It can easily get confusing. Not only at the forwarding department, but also in production, or in invoicing people will forget to apply rules or have trouble finding them.
A good system not only ensures the proper recording of agreements, it also automatically applies them to e.g. packing slips and invoices. It makes you less dependent on the recollection of that single person who made the agreements.
To err is human, we say. And although there's nothing wrong with being human, you might prefer an error-free packaging administration. As, where large quantities of reusable packaging circulate, even the smallest mistake can have major (financial) consequences.
A lack of daily insight in your reusable packaging can cause high costs and even facilitate theft or fraud. The newest software developments enable you to automatically import pooling overviews and match them with your own data and actual stock.
Integrations with ERP, WMS and financial software enable stakeholders to retrieve required information and ensures that they always have the most up-to-date details.
‘In real-life’ things are always slightly different from what your ERP or WMS can manage. Should you then just standardise transport and delivery agreements to suit the system? That doesn't strike us as desirable.
Working according to set standards and procedures is fine. But business is the work of people and special agreements can make you more competitive. By automizing every agreement and exception, you will make it easier on your counterparties, yourself and your colleagues.
You receive balance statements from pooling companies, receipts from customers and suppliers, deposit settlement bills and other data from counterparties. Especially if you use and register many different packaging items your packaging registration system can become complicated.
Every dataset is structured differently, you are sometimes lacking data and you often want to be able to search for (partial) overviews regarding specific flows, items, values or counterparties. By importing data into a system that aligns them, you create a single system containing all data on your reusable packaging.
The PackControl packaging registration system helps you automate your entire reusable packaging administration in the way you want. From now on, data from all different sources will be processed automatically.
Once you've entered agreements with counterparties, they will be applied to every transfer or order without mistakes.
Reusable packaging management is made easier, quicker and error-free.
Would you like to know more? Take a look at our website or request a free demo.