Synopsis:
- How can I Manage orders and inventory across multiple companies who might sync into multiple QuickBooks files?
- How can I get reports across all companies for inventory levels and items shipped or received over a given time period.
- How can I get estimates on Picking/packing/shipping or receiving time for items, and use that information to estimate my total required labor?
Webinar Transcript
APT University: 3PL, Multi-Company, and Resource Management
Hello everyone and welcome to APT University, Today we’re going to be looking at our features for 3PL, including the Multi Company and Resource Management Tools, which may be relevant to all kinds of businesses.
If you have any questions, we’ll be addressing those at the end, so feel free to put them into the questions panel on the gotowebinar window.
So often if you’re running a third-party logistics (3PL) company, you have a number of client-companies, and you want them to have transparency on their stock levels and fulfilment. And you’ll also want easy reporting so that you can bill them for rent and the labour charge. So AdvancePro offers the ability to have multiple companies set up on a single installation, and you can jump between it. Here’s how it works.
Lets say you have 3 user licenses to AdvancePro, and you bring on a new client-company
So here in this diagram we have your existing operations, and we might have 3 users Bob, Jane and Stephen. When you get an additional company, you get the same number of users, but you can assign them to new people, so you can keep Bob and Jane with the same logins and passwords, but you can give a login to your new customer, Denise, and they’ll be able to log in to enter orders or import them, and they could even link AdvancePro up to their QuickBooks file, so your customer can actually get a tremendous benefit from the automation and real time intelligence of AdvancePro. On top of that, we can use AdvancePro to launch online shopping carts with instant connections to the Fulfillment team.
Many of our 3PL company clients use this as a tremendous value-add for their customers and are able to pass any fees from AdvancePro directly on to their customers.
So what this looks like in reality, is when you start up AdvancePro, you can choose which company you’re logging into, and you can see your orders and pick tickets, and really manage your business relationship between the 3PL company and the client user here.
And clients will never see each others information. Each AdvancePro company can have completely separate integrations with QuickBooks files, or EDI, or web sales portals.
Now one other feature of AdvancePro that can cater to your 3PL company is our MultiCompany Report, you can use the MCR panel here to access it. this is found only in your primary company, the first company on the list. This allows you to get stock figures and turnover for every item across all companies in your AdvancePro database, so this is going to be how you’re able to collect figures for your monthly rent charges, or for any labour charges.
One last area i want to touch on is the Resource Management Console
This is enabled under Admin>utilities> Resource Management. If you need a key, please contact your AdvancePro Advisor.
Once this is enabled, there are fields on the product you’ll need to fill – these can be brought in via spreadsheet, or filled in manually under the product in the additional info tab, specifically we’re looking at the pick, pack, ship and receive time for any product, and this should be expressed in seconds for the feature to work properly.
Once you’ve filled out that data, we can come to the warehouse, either in picking or receiving, and you’ll see a new button marked RMC. what you do here is check off the orders you’ll be dealing with, and then click the RMC button, This is going to total up all the picking time across orders, and give you a labour estimate to fill the orders, this can be great for Billing, as we as understanding your requirements upfront for a busy week.
So this concludes our brief tour of the multicompany and resource management functions as it might apply to a 3PL company.
Have a great day and thanks for watching!