Logistics technology: Kewill, Oracle partner up for marketing and product integration agreement
Jeff Berman, Group News Editor -- Logistics Management, 9/18/2008
MARLBOROUGH, Mass.—Kewill, a provider of logistics and global trade software, said it has entered into a marketing agreement with Oracle.
As part of this marketing agreement, Kewill and Oracle will collaborate on an integration of Kewill Flagship—Kewill’s Web-based multi-carrier shipping management application with an emphasis on parcel shipping—for existing and future Oracle Transportation Management customers. Kewill said that this integration will offer its shipper-customers using Oracle Transportation Management with various “enhanced capabilities,” including quoting, rating, and manifesting for small parcel shipping.
Prior to this news, Kewill and Oracle had an existing relationship in which they had joint customers using their applications, with sales representatives from each company working together, said Brian Hodgson, Kewill vice president of marketing and business development.
Hodgson said that having a number of joint customers with Oracle, in a sense, served as the impetus for this marketing agreement.
“The parcel shipping market has changed dramatically in the last few years,” said Hodgson. “Five-to-eight years ago, services were bought at a more departmental level by a [large shipper] with facilities around the world, and usually the decision to buy a parcel shipping application was made by each facility.”
And over the past few years as shippers have bought global ERP systems like Oracle, Hodgson said they want a parcel shipping system that can implement one set of software that can support parcel shipping for their entire enterprise.
In terms of the integration between Kewill Flagship and Oracle Transportation Management, the companies said that they will provide Oracle Transportation Management customers with enhanced capabilities for quoting, rating, and manifesting for small parcel shipping.
Hodgson provided the following as an example of the integration at work.
“A shipper using Oracle Transportation Management may be taking an order from a retailer ordering something small to be shipped via parcel to a residence or it may be ordering large pieces of equipment. There is an order-entry process that is Web-based through an e-commerce site or a call center, and at that point they use Kewill Flagship to determine the rates that will be used and are then quoted back to the shipper.”
The order then flows to a warehouse, where the warehouse has an order picking and packing process, and at that point there may also be calls into Kewill Flagship to create a label to be attached to a box to be shipped. Hodgson explained that this is happening “upstream” in the shipping process, and at the end of the day the boxes are picked up by UPS or FedEx to be delivered into their networks. At that point, a shipper will call in looking for their shipment, and Oracle will then integrate it to Kewill Flagship for tracking information. This provides the shipper with added visibility to track shipments, and Kewill Flagship links all carrier and host system information back into Oracle Transportation Management to provide updated tracking information.
Oracle Transportation Management officially entered the market in February 2006, following Oracle’s November 2005 acquisition of G-Log, a transportation management software provider.
The companies also said they will also work in tandem “on joint sales and marketing opportunities offering best-in-breed solutions that help meet the demands of some of the most sophisticated and complex enterprise organizations worldwide.”
“The integration of Kewill Flagship will extend OTM’s multi-modal global solution by offering enhanced small parcel capabilities to our customers,” said Derek Gittoes, vice president of Logistics Product Strategy, Oracle Corporation, in a statement. “Our work with Kewill is another example of the power of our Oracle PartnerNetwork ecosystem, to offer shared technologies and solutions that enable faster results and high customer satisfaction.”
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