Kinaxis + Must-knows to Manage Your Transport

What does Kinaxis do?

Kinaxis is a cloud-based supply chain management software aimed at giving companies the information required to make fast, informed decisions. It eliminates siloed information and creates a transparent supply chain network while eliminating redundancies and leveraging Machine Learning and AI technologies to maximize efficiency. Kinaxis services aid in better operational planning for supply and demand as well as inventory management. The command-and-control center further gives you a complete real-time view of your supply chain with insights into risks and opportunities.

Main Kinaxis Features

Kinaxis Supply Planning

Kinaxis helps identify key stakeholders and simulate multiple plans simultaneously to make quick decisions. This makes it easier to spot issues with demand forecasts, sales orders, shipments, capacity, etc. and optimize factory resources to boost efficiency and improve customer service. Users can also get automatic alerts on supply demand mismatches and leverage AI to automate repetitive manual tasks.

Kinaxis Demand Planning

Kinaxis takes the guesswork out of demand planning. By pulling together inputs from multiple stakeholders onto a central platform, it makes it easier to monitor forecasts and order statuses and coordinate actions across the supply chain network. It improves both short-term and long-term forecasts to maintain a healthy bottom line and a happy customer base.

Kinaxis Inventory Management

Kinaxis simplifies inventory management by providing valuable insights into cross-site inventories. You can proactively identify opportunities and risks, simulate changes and balance trade-offs to maximize performance.

Kinaxis Command & Control Center

Kinaxis gives you centralized control over all supply chain processes to manage and eliminate volatility. It empowers you to automatically adjust supply-demand plans based on real-time scenarios and spot potential disruptions at the earliest.

Kinaxis Competitors

SAP TM

SAP Transportation Management (SAP TM) is an application aimed at simplifying logistics and transportation requirements. It helps businesses manage inbound and outbound cargo movement within the country as well as internationally. SAP TM provides a range of solutions for order consolidation, transport demand management, shipment tracking and reports to give businesses more visibility and control over their supply chain processes.

Oracle Transportation Management

The Oracle Transportation Management (OTM) platform helps businesses manage domestic and international multi-modal transportation requirements across the supply chain. In addition, it makes information on orders, shipments, rates, billings and claims available through integrations with other supply chain management and finance applications. OTM also offers the services of a digital assistant.

Shipwell

Shipwell is a freight management platform that offers an all-in-one solution for automation, visibility, transportation management, analytics and integration. The cloud-native system can help source capacity, plan shipments, track performance, communicate with customers and carriers and settle finances. It can be integrated with eCommerce platforms and well as other supply chain and shipping applications to streamline operations.

Kinaxis May Not Properly Manage Ocean Transportation

Kinaxis is a popular supply chain software to manage your overall transportation requirements. However, this may not be enough for managing ocean transportation. If you work with regular exports or imports, you may need to integrate other solutions such as BuyCo’s Container Shipping Platform to manage all your container shipping needs. When you’re comparing solutions to be integrated with Kinaxis, some of the features to insist on are below.

Features Needed to Manage Your Ocean Transportation

Proper Collaboration features

You may not want everyone on your team or your freight forwarders to access TMS data. After all, this is sensitive information. With a Container Shipping Platform like BuyCo, you can control who can and cannot access shipping data so that they only see the information that is relevant to them. Partners with access can use the platform to chat, exchange documents and collaborate on shipments. These control and collaborative features are an important part of streamlining operations.

Efficient Container Scheduling and Booking

Your supply chain software may not be connected to all ocean carriers. Hence, you would have to visit each carrier’s website independently to get quotes, schedules, etc. and then tabulate information separately for comparison. This is slow and prone to errors. Instead, you need to integrate it with a shipping platform that allows you to centralize your search for carrier schedules, allocations, rates and more. With BuyCo, all of this information is easily accessible along with other information such as CO2 emissions, ETA, etc. This makes it easier to choose the right carrier for your cargo and schedule the same.

Accurate Container Tracking

While a TMS is essential to transportation management, it has limitations when it comes to tracking cargo movement across the ocean. However, Container Shipping Platforms like BuyCo specialize in this niche and hence can track your cargo accurately irrespective of where it may be. In addition, you can also find out container locations in warehouses, get accurate ETDs/ETAs and be notified of exceptions that may occur.

Robust Reporting over your Container Shipping

Many container shipping operations may be executed outside of a TMS. Hence, all information pertaining to KPIs required to optimize ocean operations may not be available on the TMS. What you need is a Container Shipping Platform that makes information related to KPIs such as allocation usage, overall volumes, detention and demurrage, freight forwarder and ocean carrier performance, CO2 consumption, etc. This kind of reporting is required to work on improving the efficiency of your shipping operations.

Kinaxis Integration

Lastly, you need to ensure that the Container Shipping Platform you choose can be integrated with Kinaxis so that it becomes a transportation management hub. BuyCo is one such example. It can be seamlessly integrated with Kinaxis such that the information entered in Kinaxis is accessible on BuyCo and vice-versa.

BuyCo: The Best Solution to Manage Container Shipping along with Kinaxis TM

When it comes to managing supply and demand or keeping track of inventory status, Kinaxis is a very good system. However, the services available for shipping operations are limited. Integrating Kinaxis with the BuyCo Container Shipping Platform helps streamline logistics and makes the overall supply chain processes more efficient.

BuyCo connects companies to 95% of all ocean carriers and forwarders on a single platform. This makes it easier for all partners to share information centrally and eliminate silos. By making the system transparent, it also helps build trust.

In addition, BuyCo gives companies the ability to maintain complete control over end-to-end shipping operations. It leverages AI to automate processes for shipment planning and scheduling and provides multi-sourced tracking information so you know where your cargo is at all times and can get early alerts to possible disruptions. By doing so, BuyCo helps improve productivity and customer service.

In terms of long-term planning, BuyCo provides access to detailed analytical reports on various KPIs such as carrier performance, internal performance, detention and demurrage, CO2 emissions, etc. so you can make data-driven decisions to optimize operations.

Integrating BuyCo with Kinaxis can help your team be more efficient and ensure that customers stay satisfied at all times.