Sendflex
Best-in-Class Parcel TMS

The eCommerce boom has significantly impacted the logistics landscape, particularly in the final mile delivery segment. Order fulfillment and carrier diversification, combined with increasing parcel rates, have contributed to a very challenging environment for shippers. Cost-effective decision-making has become increasingly complex, leading to margin erosion in a hyper-competitive market.

Sendflex, a first-of-its-kind third-generation parcel transportation management system (TMS), is designed to address these challenges by automating data-driven decisions that help shippers control costs, protect margins and enhance customer delivery experiences.

A Third-Generation Parcel Management Technology

Sendflex represents the third wave of parcel management technology, combining high-speed automation with advanced machine-learning intelligence. Under the leadership of CEO Bob Malley, who has over 30 years of experience in revolutionizing parcel management systems, the company builds on a legacy of innovation. He introduced Clippership, the first integrated multi-carrier shipping system to address automation. The second generation of shipping systems focused on enterprise scale when Bob launched Transtream, the leading internet-based enterprise parcel shipping platform.

“With Sendflex, our mission is to conquer the complexity that has crept into the parcel industry. Simply automating carrier label printing at the end of a conveyor line isn’t enough anymore. Shippers need a lot more control over parcel fulfillment decision-making throughout the order to ship processes,” says Malley. As a cloud-native, microservice technology, Sendflex is perfectly architected to solve a number of problems that today’s parcel shippers face.

Enhanced Control over Cartonization, Carrier Selection and Fulfillment Decisions
Previous generations of parcel technology focused on automating shipping execution for a few carriers in a handful of distribution centers. Single-sourced parcel carrier business rules were fairly simple and addressed shipper-specific business rules, when necessary, with custom programming. However, as eCommerce drove more shippers to adopt complex fulfillment and delivery strategies, inflexible customizations have inhibited the ability of logistics managers to adapt to dynamic market changes without incurring inflexible programming costs and long project timelines.

Sendflex overcomes all these challenges. Instead of requiring IT and engineering services to implement business rules, Sendflex offers non-technical business users unprecedented control over configuring optimization instructions in minutes instead of weeks of programming and testing. Sendflex optimization instructions automate decision-making related to carrier service selection, sustainably packing SKUs into a carton, adhering to customer preferences and rate markups, and avoiding unnecessary surcharges, fees and late deliveries.

“What matters most to our parcel TMS customers is the control to automate and enforce cost-saving rules throughout the order-to-invoice process as they see fit. Then quickly change as their requirements change,” says Malley.

Protecting Margins by Calculating Shipping Costs at High Speeds

Shippers have seen ever-widening gaps between expected and actual shipping charges that unexpectedly appear on carrier invoices. This gap contributes to margin erosion at a time when profits are thinning in the hyper-competitive eCommerce space.

Over the years, carrier surcharges and accessorial fees added by parcel carriers have become hard to predict or avoid. Extended area deliveries, peak season surcharges, dimensional weight adjustments, floating incentive tiers, address corrections, residential fees and other unexpected costs bloat carrier invoices. As a result, many shippers struggle to accurately calculate what the cost for shipping an order will be.

Sendflex features an in-platform, high-speed optimization engine capable of processing 20,000 rates, times in transit and optimization instructions per second. This enables shippers to calculate expenses for a wider range of shipping options during the online purchasing process. Costs are more accurate because the company uses cartonization algorithms to instantly determine the size and weight of cartons based on optimized SKU packing instructions. It can also identify potential surcharges early on in the process and account for them, making necessary corrections or selecting a different carrier service.

“Having a high-speed cartonization, rating and machine-learning predictive delivery time engine is a much better technology to use than slow, unreliable carrier rating APIs. And that is way better than guesswork, averages and other rules of thumb which leads to unpredictable gross margins after freight costs,” says Malley.

Plugging Parcel Spending Leakage during Order Fulfillment and Shipping
By the time a carton reaches a shipping workstation, it is already too late to take effective corrective action for cost-effective cartonization, carrier service selection and cost-saving opportunities. This occurs when legacy shipping systems only look at one order at a time, focusing more on label printing than informed decisions.

Sendflex tackles this problem by analyzing waves of orders for cost-savings opportunities further upstream from shipping, creating optimized plans that can be generated, compared, and subsequently released to fulfillment with carrier labels. Or legacy shipping systems can process labels later according to Sendflex's optimization instructions. Upstream optimization can take advantage of consolidation and drop shipping opportunities, as well as ensure packing processes during fulfillment do not result in shipping air, wasting corrugate and unexpected dimensional weight adjustments.

For example, a fabric distributor improved their margins by using Sendflex to control cost-effective and more efficient parcel packing and LTL pallet building. They use instructions to mark up shipping costs based on SKU characteristics, customer tier and cost of goods. In the words of their distribution center manager, “We finally have time to complete cycle counting during the day.”

“Every CFO should insist on parcel optimized order planning. They can see where the spend leakages are based on auditor spend reports and analytic dashboards but need a way to operationalize the fixes. Sendflex provides the plumbing necessary to make the right decisions at the right time,” says Malley.

Our mission is to conquer the complexity that has crept into the parcel industry. Simply automating carrier label printing at the end of a conveyor line isn’t enough anymore. Shippers need a lot more control over parcel fulfillment decision-making throughout the order to ship processes

There are many shipping systems that provide static reports and dashboards to describe possible situations. Sendflex provides a simulator that takes advantage of high-speed optimization to rerun shipping history and determine uncertainties using a different set of optimization instructions. Simulations can determine probable scenarios like shipping orders from a different fulfillment center, shipping by an alternative carrier, using a different set of carton sizes, applying proposed carrier rate increases, marking up shipping fees and other criteria with KPIs that indicate the cost per package, delivery times and total costs.

“IT professional have always had the luxury of using software sandboxes to test technology,” says Malley. “With Sendflex, logistics managers have a low-risk way of figuring out what the cost and delivery impact will be in making changes, but without having to do it in the physical world.”

Embracing the Future with Sendflex

With eCommerce still less than 18 percent of retail sales and growing, it only makes sense for shippers to adopt technology like Sendflex that empowers businesses to stay competitive in the dynamic and ever-changing parcel industry, in the present and the future.

“We are honored that Logistics Outlook has recognized Sendflex as the leading parcel TMS platform,” says Malley. “Our commitment is to help shippers move at the speed of eCommerce and stay ahead in a rapidly evolving, competitive industry.”