Kewill, INTTRA expand partnership

Kewill will use INTTRA’s schedules tool to supplement its transportation and trade management platform MOVE, adding to its use of INTTRA booking and shipping instructions tools.    The transportation and global trade management software provider Kewill is expanding an existing relationship with the ocean e-commerce platform INTTRA, the companies said this week.
   Kewill users will now have access to INTTRA’s sailings and schedule database, supplementing the booking and shipping instructions tools INTTRA has provided to Kewill since 2008. Those tools are a key part of the global transportation management offering that Kewill offers through its MOVE platform, which links its transportation and trade compliance modules.
   “INTTRA’s products have delivered powerful results for Kewill and our customers for nearly a decade,” said Jim Hoefflin, chief operating officer at Kewill. “Our close relationship has made it possible to integrate two leading supply chain technologies, delivering a world-class solution to Kewill customers.”
   INTTRA’s shipment management solutions underlie a number of major global transportation management service offerings, including those of Descartes and JDA Software, which announced a partnership with INTTRA in January.
   Around a quarter of all ocean bookings globally pass through the INTTRA platform.
   Kewill, meanwhile, has been rounding out its MOVE offering in recent months. Evan Puzey, chief marketing officer at Kewill, told American Shipper in late 2015 that the company is developing a yard management system to fit between the TMS and warehouse management system currently on the platform.
   Both Kewill and INTTRA have significant customers bases in the freight forwarding market, and Puzey said part of the drive to offer warehousing and yard management tools is that forwarders are increasingly be asked by customers to handle those functions.
   It’s all part of what Puzey referred to a supply chain execution convergence (a term he borrowed from the analyst Gartner) to describe where Kewill is heading.
   “Companies have to collapse all these departments into a single logistics division, so you’re not just optimizing everything individually,” he said. “Because if you’re optimizing one area, you might be making someone else’s job harder. A single level of visibility allows that collapse to happen.”
   He also said logistics companies have to focus on what the next step in the omni-channel evolution will require of them.
   “Omni-channel looks at the maximized use of inventory at a fixed point,” he said. “What that ignores is the inventory that’s already in flow. Should we direct some of that inventory that’s on a truck from L.A. to Memphis at Phoenix, to go to Chicago?
   “The technical capability exists on the demand forecasting side. It’s enabling the information to come out of those systems into a single location. The challenge is getting companies to force that information to be released into one location.”