Third Party Logistics in BYD using External Warehouses – An Overview Part 2 of 2

Welcome back – this is part 2 of my blog on how to use Third Party Logistics feature in BYD. 

To recap, I wrote about the business case on how this feature is used for your Order-to-Cash process for integrate the shipping of Sales Orders when you use external warehouses to ship for you.  There is a dedicated workcenter – Third-Party Logistics – and you can manage the Outbound (as in goods going outbound from the warehouses like order shipments), and Inbound (as in goods being received INTO the warehouse like items for a PO or customer returns to you).

Continuing on for the Procure-to-Pay side, 3PL has 3 web services or APIs to process incoming goods.  Your 3PL vendor will need to consume and respond to these 3 APIs.

These 3 web services are:

1. RequestInboundDeliveryExecution (IDER) based on a PO
2. InboundDeliveryReplicationOut (DDAN) based on the items of a PO.  It’s like the Advanced Shipment notification
3. ProcessInboundDeliveryExecutionConfirmation (IDEC) – confirmation of 1 or 2.

When a PO is created and approved for items that will be received at the external warehouse, BYD will first call the webservice #1 to send a IDER message, so the external warehouse (aka 3PL warehouse) is aware of the PO.  As the PO vendor notifies the ship-date of the PO items,  BYD create the DDAN messages (webservice #2) to send to the external warehouse.  The 3PL warehouse will receive the actual goods in the PO, and send back IDEC (webservice #3) to confirm which items were received.

Below is an example of an IDEC message (from the documentation).  Each message is XML data, sent in a SOAP webservice call.

This uses the request-response paradigm – similar to ODER + ODEC in part 1.

The end result of both sides of the 3PL integration – inbound and outbound processes – in BYD is that your sales order, inventory, AR and AP, and downstream business processes are maintained consistently.

Now I have provided an overview, let’s touch on the project side.  A 3PL project requires a good level of project planning, technical understanding, multiple test scenarios and end-to-end testing.  A seasoned expert is highly recommended, since the knowledge transfer will be needed for the 3PL vendor also – not just your own company.  The development workload is mostly the 3PL vendor side as their IT team needs to consume these webservices / APIs.  On the BYD side, the webservices are ready to be used and no coding is needed.

Lastly it should not be confused with Third Party Fulfillment feature, whose work center is right next to Third Party Logistics.

I welcome your feedback and questions on this feature.