The add-on we have created in this chapter is definitely not ready to be used by a real company but it demonstrates how to create a flexible solution that can be easily expanded by others.
Most modern logistic service providers offer other services to customers, such as value-added logistics, item tracking, and third- and fourth-party logistics.
When a company offers value-added logistics services, they not only keep products on inventory but they also offer services around this, such as display packaging.
This can be best compared with manufacturing in Microsoft Dynamics NAV. A list of items called a bill of materials is combined into a new product. This new product is then shipped to the customer.
When the displays are no longer necessary, for example, when a marketing campaign is finished, the displays need to be picked up from the customer and disassembled into the original products.
In our solution, this could be implemented by creating a VAL region where the products are moved to.
Our customers also want to know the whereabouts of their products, which warehouse they are in, and which product was shipped to which customer. This is especially important in the food and medicine industry to be able to call back a lot, if something is wrong.
To implement this in our solution, it requires some changes. First, we need to implement a Tracking Code in the Storage Entries, and secondly, we need to implement some kind of Tracking Entries when we ship a product outside our warehouse since our logistics solution currently does not have any entries, only status fields.
In our example database, we plan shipments on routes and drive them to the end customer with our own trucks. This is called second-party logistics. First-party logistics would be if we were to handle our own products with our own trucks.
The following figure shows the increasing complexity of logistics if it gets outsourced and combined:
If we provide third-party logistics, we would use other companies to offer parts of the services to our customers. We will then tell them which part of the service to handle and report back to us when it is finished. The third party involved does not know the details of the complete transaction.
If we offer fourth-party logistics, we would outsource a complete warehouse or route to another company. We would only tell them which product should be moved where and they would handle it, without us knowing the details.
Very often, third- and fourth-party logistics are mixed but they are usually handled by interfaces between different companies.