Every day in retail stores across the country shoppers come across cardboard displays at the end of aisles offering a range of specially packaged goods from a brand – say a bag of five chocolate bars from Hershey’s for Halloween or a package of shampoos from L’Oreal for Mother’s Day or an extra large box of Kellogg’s Corn Flakes sold at Costco and unavailable at other grocery stores.
Few realize these and other promotions may be specially packaged not by the brand but by third party logistics companies, some of whom are big names like FedEx and DHL.
Nulogy, a Toronto based software-as-a-service company, has been offering cloud solutions to automate processes for contract packaging providers for several years including PackManager, for managing third party logistics processes from a quotation to shipping, and QCloud, for managing their quality control processes.
This month it added a third service, Nulogy GO, which brands can use for co-ordinating their work with these contract manufactuers.
“There’s a trend of increasing manipulation and customization of mass produced products for consumer markets, and we build solutions that help that part of the supply chain make that possible,” Kevin Wong, a co-founder and head of products, said in an interview.
“When there’s lots of different suppliers and disparate systems there’s no way to collect all of the data about what’s going on to provide meaningful insights into either the brand or the suppliers to improve their partnerships and collaboration.” GO, he said, brings all that information into one place.
CIOs should note that in addition to connecting to PackManager and QCloud, GO connects to enterprise resource planning and warehouse managing systems from SAP, Oracle, JDA, Manhattan Associates and others to provide visibility into real-time capacity, order tracking, and performance tracking.
Wong said pricing depends on the size of module, functionality and number of sites the customer wants.
Customers of either PackManager or Qcloud include ARI Packaging, Crescent Packing Corp., Nova Pack and others.