Report: Mars Inventory Re-measurement Project for Cardinal Logistics

This report analyzes the Mars Inventory Re-measurement Project undertaken by Cardinal Logistics, focusing on the implementation and benefits of Warehouse Management Systems (WMS) and Transportation Management Systems (TMS). The introduction provides an overview of WMS, emphasizing its role in inventory control, optimization, and supply chain management, with a focus on Cardinal Logistics' use of automated inventory management. The report details the Cardinal WMS technology system, highlighting its benefits such as time and cost savings, efficient stock room management, and the reduction of cancelled orders. It then explores the Cardinal Logistics TMS system, which aids in the planning, optimization, and execution of goods transportation, along with its benefits like enhanced transportation order planning, controlled inventory management, and reduced invoice errors. The report also discusses 3PL business processes and the methods used to locate and measure the volume and mass of individual Mars SKUs. The report describes the input data and the benefits that Cardinal Logistics can gather from the Pitan TMS system using EDI. Finally, the report concludes with an overview of the project's findings and its overall effect on Cardinal Logistics' business operations.

Running head: MARS INVENTORY RE-MEASUREMENT PROJECT
Mars Inventory Re-measurement Project
Name of the Student
Name of the University
Author Note

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Table of Contents
Introduction................................................................................................................................2
Introduction to Cardinal WMS and TMS technology systems..............................................3
Cardinal WMS technology system.....................................................................................3
Cardinal Logistics TMS system.........................................................................................5
Introduction into 3PL business processes..............................................................................9
Using the above to locate individual Mars SKU’s and measure their volume and mass.....11
Input data into an excel spreadsheet.....................................................................................13
Benefits that can be gathered by Cardinal Logistics with Pitan TMS system using EDI....14
Report on overall project findings and the effect on Cardinal Business as a whole............15
Conclusion................................................................................................................................17
References................................................................................................................................20

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Introduction
Every organisation is found to be utilising the benefits of warehouse management
system or WMS for the organisation to have several advantages added to the business
process. it is normally software application that is utilised by organisation to feasibly control
and manage the warehouses that the organisation handles according to the day to day
operations. In addition to that, the software also happens to guide through the way in which
any addition to the inventory is accepted within the warehouse and how it can be optimised,
picked, packed or even shift for the requirement of the orders. Sometimes they are also found
to be implementing the on permutations and combinations to produce such a system that
would also advise on how the inventory addition and subtraction can be utilised for the
perfect replenishment. a warehouse management system provides several benefits to the
organisation and this is why various organisations look out for a successful implementation
of Warehouse Management System software application. the organisation might also be
looking forward to design and optimise the functionality within the warehouses controlling
the centre management distributed equally throughout every business corporation regarding
the warehouse management (Marchet et al., 2017). In addition to that there are several
benefits that WMS can provide a business. this also includes the optimisation of various
processes within the organisation, the allocation of efficient labour for the appropriate
business operation, the boosting up of employee morale, establish a proper enhancement of
the supply chain management further evolving the customer relationships, reducing the total
operational expenses for the organisation having a better balance for management of
inventory within the organisation even if there is a huge number of input and output from the
inventory, proper integration of the ERP system that the organisation uses to handle the
warehouse and manage them and also suggest a proper way by which the security and safety

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for the management of the warehouse operations including the inventory information is
maintained throughout.
This is why the following report would identify the Cardinal WMS and TMS
Technology systems along with the 3PL business processes, and the ways by which the
location of the individual customer measurement for volume and mass would be utilised, the
input data, the correct update of all the values in the Pitan TMS with the report of the overall
project findings and their effect on Cardinal Logistics business as a whole.
Introduction to Cardinal WMS and TMS technology systems
Cardinal WMS technology system
It has been found that Cardinal Logistics usually utilizes the Automated Inventory
Management for its warehouse management system or WMS. The automatic inventory
management is a new technology that most efficiently handles the warehouse management
for Cardinal Logistics. there are several benefits of implementing a warehouse management
system that is being enjoyed by the organisation and for that is well the organisation believes
in having an automated inventory management system so that both time and money for the
organisation is saved. in any business organisation time and money is considered to be the
most valuable of all provided all the management of the systems is dependent upon both
these factors. The primary involvement of benefits, profit or losses are all dependent upon
time and money and this is what the organisation has been looking forward to save with the
utilisation of automated inventory management. the stock room that the organisation has for
its warehouses is able to be managed in a very feasible manner with this technology. it is
mostly found that an automated inventory management system is able to manage the small
free setup for the stock rooms as well with locations mentioned in barcode and also, they are
extremely potent in identifying minimum and maximum levels of the stock rooms. in addition
to that there are various levels added to the automated inventory management system that

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helps in in the organisation to handle a lot of warehouse management operations and also
with the help of this technology they are not charged as much for the technician if any issues
are found to be replacing the staff functions. It is also found that the technology provides a lot
of innovative management systems for the organisation including the weekly and monthly
recounts performed at regular interval, placing the purchase order for replenishment,
receiving the material at the time of its arrival, paying for the freight of inbound, restocking
the appropriate bins. Simply putting it forward, an automated inventory management system
is a technology that helps in adding two successful programs for a warehouse management
system which helps in adding, deleting, transferring, editing the product data present in the
inventory for the business. it also helps in collect all the product data from the suppliers
through the utilisation of the company website and with the implementation of the data that
our feet in the website, they extract it within a form of an XML or a CSV file (Mooney,
2015). The extracted data may also have the possibility of forming into some other type of
files and all the data are then push to the website. mostly the organisation utilizes the
automated inventory management system for the benefits that they provide the organisation.
The benefits can be listed in details as follows:
 The product has huge skill about the photography skills and which is
extremely important for the organisation. It also helps in having high quality
product images which as a potential of increasing the sales for the organisation
at the top most priority level.
 The technology has the potential of saving time immensely even with huge
number of data entry. This provides much more time to the organisation for
marketing and development of the store for the organisation as a whole.
 It can also help in the reduction of cancelled orders with the help of the
manual inventory management so that the people handling the warehouse

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management system can track down the inventory within themselves.
However, it becomes much more difficult for manual inventory management
to reduce the cancelled orders if it gets out of stock for the order has to be
backordered. for these cases the automated inventory management system
provides no need for manually updating the quantity of inventory if there is a
cancellation, backorder or even out of stock orders.
 The accuracy of data with the utilisation of automated inventory management
system helps the warehouse in such a way that the manual typing procedure
that used almost 3 to 4 hours can be reduced. the manual typing process only
included copy pasting the product descriptions and there were huge chances of
making so many mistakes for the same system. this is why the automated
inventory management system would also help in handling the manual
updating process for the inventory quantity e and there will be no wrong
typing, popping or testing of wrong product SKU.
 With the automated inventory management system there would be no
production of old data for the inventory items, including the description and
pricing data for the products. As soon as there would be any update for the
product from the end of the supplier it would be readily added to the inventory
data and the website at the same time would be updated readily.
This is why the automated inventory warehouse system was utilised by Cardinal
Logistics so that all the benefits that the technology provides the organisation can be enjoyed
throughout without any problem arising for handling the inventory for the organisation
related to the management of inventory and other technological factors.

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Cardinal Logistics TMS system
The transportation management system or TMS that Cardinal logistics used for the
organisation help the organisation with the planning, optimisation and execution of the
physical movement of utilised goods that also form the subset for the supply chain
management for the organisation. Cardinal Logistics deals with the transportation of goods
with the help of a transportation management system, which is a logistics platform which
enables the organisation for managing and optimising the operations that occurs daily for the
transportation of goods from one place to another for the organisation. It is open identified as
a module included within the enterprise resource planning system and also their available
with the supply chain management suits for which it can help the organisation in managing
the inbound movement, procurement, shipment, outbound and freight management fashioned
by several tools. These tools generally comprise of the route planning, optimisation,
operation execution, load building, payment and freight auditing (Hendrawan et al., 2018).
Along with it also utilizes the tools for order visibility, yard management and carrier
management. Normally our transport management system has the primary role of
understanding the singular goal of improving shipment efficiency along with the reduction of
the time and costs with an upper hand over receiving the real time visibility of the supply
chain. This provides organisation with a probability of having increased customer service.
For the organisation, transport management system serves both the logistics service providers
and the shipper service providers. This includes several functioning like distribution,
manufacturing, e-commerce and understanding the third-party logistics for 3PL as well.
There are several benefits for which Cardinal Logistics are looking forward to add several
enhanced values to the organisation. These applied benefits for the transport management
system can be listed in details to be described as follows:

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 The benefits that the organisation enjoys after the implementation of the
transport management system includes the transportation order planning and
its execution which happens to integrate extremely well with any enterprise
including their order management system, warehouse management system and
the customer relationship management or CRM and supplier relationship
management or SRM system. there are several levels at which the transport
management system helps the organisation and it also includes the supply and
management of the demand that occurs in transportation. in this way Cardinal
logistics can enable various utilisation of the system in such a way that the
planning and management for the logistics can be taken care of determining
the most cost effective and efficient way of using a much better route for the
supply and management of the inventory items that are required by the
customers. this transportation order planning includes the proper utilisation of
the efficient root planning, career mix, mode selection and load optimisation.
 there is so much more controlled inventory management system and visible
supply chain management with the utilisation of transportation management
system that Cardinal Logistics puts into action. This happens to be e enabled
by having the potential of tracking and monitoring the life cycle for every
order and every shipment. Not just that, this can also occur for the
organisation to have a much better visibility in real time so that every aspect
would have a proper status update. Identifying this there would be various
reasons why the accurate forecast on the inventory is a short so that the
accountability of the supply chain network is also managed.
 there is reduced invoice errors which happens to be extending from the
utilisation of order processing and freight payment such that the users, which

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in this case is the organisation itself has the ability to reduce their personal
errors that could have been possible due to manual handling.
 There is added intelligence with the technology followed by the TMS software
such that it can essentially have an insight for the reporting of the capabilities
for providing a detailed idea about the matrix and afraid data so that any error
within the entire supply chain can be identified. This enables a better finding
out of problems with the focus taken on necessary mitigation factors for
reduction of cost and improvement of service delivery at the same time
creating report controlling every discrepancy, reporting every discrepancy and
monitoring them as well.
Not just the organisation enjoys all the benefits that WMS and TMS provides
organisation, but there are several other ways by which Cardinal logistics several problems
with the utilisation of TMS and automated inventory management system or AIMS as well.
the identified disadvantages of the inventory management systems can follow several reasons
due to which organisations utilise them but also has to deal with a lot of disadvantages at the
same time. Cardinal Logistics always have to look forward to this so that the handling of the
business is not affected by the automated inventory management systems in such a way that
there would be no coming back from the situation. This includes the disadvantages that are
embodied on the system due to the factor that it is an automated system. Being computerized,
one of the biggest problems that the technology can possibly have is system crash and the
potential of the software being aborted by several system crash. there might be any power
outages, a corrupt hard drive for even other technical issues that has the potential of resulting
into a huge loss of the required data. they can also be a potential of having extensively
interrupted data for which there might be occurrences where Cardinal Logistics cannot access
the data that they require right at that moment of time and without a proper backup there can

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also be further potential of data loss. in addition to that and automated system mind be
susceptible to malicious hacks such that the valuable resources regarding the consumer
information or even the company is hacked. since it is a point of sale software system that is
being utilised by Cardinal Logistics, there are used potential financial information within the
organisation and its management systems regarding the warehouses. so, there might be
chances where the systems are handling owner details, when the details even client details.
So, they have to look forward to a proper updating of all the fire was continued to protect the
information within the organisation. they always have to look forward to randomly update the
anti-virus software for the firewall that the organisation is utilising. In addition to that, the
automated system is extremely useful for saving time and money and therefore physical
inventory audits are no longer to be seen. there is no requirement of doing physical work but
it is also required to have a continuous and regular auditing system so that no spoilage of
breakage occurs. this is why there is a potential of internal theft and manipulation for the
auditing and inventory systems including the management as the internal theft or
manipulation can be apparently managed by the business owners.
The transport management system also has its several advantages including the
different mishandling of the optimised processes due to the automated and computerized
systems and all of the identified problems for TMS can also occur deprecating the automated
warehouse management system both of them are automated in nature.
Introduction into 3PL business processes
3PL third party logistics is a business process that mostly provides outsourced
logistics services so that anything which is remotely closer to be involving the management
of procurement plan having many or singular facets can be fulfilled by the business activities.
Muslim this organisation has a much broader meaning that is probably applied to the service
of the contract involving the shipping of items for storing them in in the warehouses that the

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business organisations possess. this can neither be a single provider that has transportation
facilities and warehouse storage facilities or it can also help in having a system white bundle
of services that can handle the throughout supply chain management for any organisation.
With simple example this can be understandable. Simply putting together if it is look closer
towards the establishment of the logistics systems provided by any organisation and DHL
logistics system (Christensen et al., 2017). DHL is an organisation that mostly provides the
logistics services to any other organisation. the first receive the order from any particular
organisation about the requirement of some items for more than one items from supplying it
from the source to the client base or the customers. they manage all the activities that include
collecting the inventory item from the organisation, handling the supply of the item to their
own warehouse system, managing the warehouse system of their own with the utility of their
business processes, managing the warehouse including the item, supplying the item to the
destination and managing the subtraction of the item from their own inventory system,
providing the client with the proper tracking of the item from being collected to either be
shipped or to be dispatched, and right at that point where the item reaches the customer. all
the activities that have started from taking the inventory item from the organisation to
handing it over to the customer required that item, is handled by DHL and DHL is the
organisation with the 3PL business process.
However, this is an example by which the third-party logistics provider organisation
can utilise the supply and distribution of the services whenever they are required and
controlling not just the cost of the effectivity of the logistic department but also focusing on
the core competence for the producing of the items. There can be many different varieties of
the third-party logistics organisations and varieties of services that the provides the other
organisations as well. there might also be several services that they provide and also it can
occur that an organisation has its own logistics system which also acts as a third-party

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logistics system to any other organisation. It was first found it in the 1970 where the
identification of marketing companies where done according to the transportation contract so
that pointing out of the transportation factors would be done properly. This included the
different transportation features that included two parties to ship and carry any item at the
same time. As per the Motor Carrier Act of 1980, there was reduction in the tracking rates
and this also increased huge amount of competition for the concept of third-party logistics
organisations. there are several benefits that the third-party logistics can provide including the
handling of the logistics. other than that, the other varieties also include the packaging,
fulfilment and distribution, warehousing and saving the cost of supplying and also monitoring
the supply chain management. there is no requirement for an organisation to have a
warehouse and maintain the same or even have a cute stuff for monitoring the supply chain
operations if they just use the third-party logistics organisation for handling the supply chain
management system (Rapanoela et al., 2015). Therefore, the organisation would save a lot of
time and capital to be invested on handling and maintaining a warehouse. there is much better
performance by the organisation that provide the third-party logistics based on their singular
focus on just the supply chain operations and handling and maintaining the warehouse. did
not have to think about other purposes and this is why they enjoy a much better ability to
scale the operation that goes throughout the services provided to its customers. it would be
much easier for an organisation to suddenly have a requirement of shipping much more items
than it was usually a short and the third-party logistics would easily fulfil the understanding
and handling of all the shipping of the additional items according to the requirement. this
means that the third-party logistics also understands the flexibility that the organisation
required during its supply chain operations and warehouse management. Since the third party
logistics business is mostly run by automated systems nowadays, this process is much more
feasible to handle as there might even be occurrences where the organisation taking the help