The Customer:

Kiser Harriss is a family-owned third-party logistics, or 3PL, company founded in 1962. With some 750,000 square feet of warehouse space in Charlotte, NC, Kiser Harriss provides logistics, transportation and consulting services, specializing in both hazardous and nonhazardous chemical storage. They recently expanded into trucking. They also serve companies in the automotive, electronics, food service and forest products sectors.

The challenge:

• A major customer— a multi-billion-dollar chemical company —had long used SAP as its logistics system, both for its own accounting and transportation management as well as for the warehouse management within Kiser Harriss’ facilities.
• But following a series of divestments and mergers, the customer decided, in part for security reasons, that it wanted Kiser Harriss to begin using its own, discrete warehouse management system, or WMS.
• This demanded that Kiser Harriss establish a WMS that could perform all the functions of SAP while also communicating seamlessly with the customer's SAP instance.

The SC Codeworks Solution:

The crown jewel of Codeworks’ 3PL softworks solutions is Codeworks Enterprise.

This hosted WMS software solution offers cutting-edge management of 3PLs’ regions, campuses, buildings, labor, docks and workflow. Its wizard-driven set-up is swift and simple.

Enterprise is as powerful as it is versatile, allowing companies to

• Track millions of products in real time, by pallets and lots
• Charge customers by all international weight types
• Process orders either in batch or real-time

The database can be accessed simultaneously with the computer languages SQL and XML, as well as with Codeworks’ own native language.

The EDI:

Codeworks contracted with Kiser Harriss on an electronic data integration, or EDI, effort. The goal was to ensure that Enterprise mirrored all the previous functionality of the SAP within Kiser Harriss’ warehouses while communicating seamlessly with the customer’s SAP about incoming orders and outgoing shipments.

This included:

• Batch allocation
• Picking instructions
• Order confirmation

The EDI process took about 12 months and included site visits by Codeworks, in particular when it came time to get the WMS officially up and running.

The Benefit:

• Describing himself as an “SAP nerd,” Will Kiser, Vice President of Transportation for Kiser Harris, said he was reluctant to let go of a system he was proud of knowing so intimately. But the transition surprised him with its relative ease. Plus, he said, “We’ve actually had other customers interested in something similar.”
• Kiser said that working with Codeworks on the EDI also allowed him and his team to learn their own warehouse system better.
• The EDI achieved such seamless integration, the WMS became an effective extension of the SAP. “It’s like SAP thinks we were working in their system,” Kiser said.
• One particular point of customization involved modeling the SAP’s master data synchronization. Instead of having to build each individual SKU into the WMS, which would be a painstaking process, the WMS digested a detailed suite of information about particular orders from the SAP.
• The WMS also mirrored the SAP’s inbound processing, in which the customer’s advanced shipping notice, or ATN, provides a digital head’s up: It communicates to the WMS exact details of the order and what to expect from the warehousing process.
• “If we receive an order, that order should be correct. And we should be able to process it in a fairly straightforward manner,” said Kiser. “And Codeworks allows that because it’s a defined process.”