Extensiv API Integrations with a Carrier Consolidator to Reduce Shipping Costs

Our client is a 3PL provider that serves a major e-commerce furniture company. They were looking to integrate with parcel creation API's from a carrier consolidation company to reduce shipping costs.

We completed this engagement in 1 month, with thousands of orders going through this integration piece per day. 

We estimate at minimum $1 million in shipping cost savings from this integration for the 3PL provider per year.

We also helped speed up the integration, unlocking a new revenue stream for the consolidator faster.

Context

Our 3PL client was using Extensiv, a popular WMS for both tracking orders and printing parcel slips. Their WMS had direct integrations with several different carriers.

However, they were looking to integrate instead with a carrier consolidation company to reduce shipping costs.

That way they would have just one partner handling the shipping, and the consolidation company would help negotiate rates between carriers, rate shop, and handle package collection for them.

Problem

Initially they needed their WMS to directly integrate with the consolidation company's API's for them.

However, the WMS company didn't do custom features like this unless they put out a feature request and there was a large enough community vote for it.

Obviously this would take too long. Especially as they were planning to have thousands of orders per day go through this consolidation company, that they decided to build the integration directly.

This project was already 1 month behind schedule, and they needed a solution fast. The 3PL Provider brought us on to help with this integration.

Our Approach

Our goal was to always start with the ideal solution, which would be a direct integration between the WMS and the consolidation company. After investigations and talks with the WMS company, it became clear that this was not possible, so we decided the next best solution would be to build a custom integration for them.

This involved building a server for this 3PL Provider that would use the WMS's API's to poll for recent orders.

Once we had all the recent orders, we would use the consolidation company's API's to create parcel slips for each of those orders.

After spending 1 week on discovery and architecting the solution out, we then spent the next 3 weeks on implementing the solution, testing, and deploying this in the final week.

Results

The server we built out now handles thousands of their orders per day, and is a critical piece of their warehouse software infrastructure.

Since deployment, there have been no maintenance requests or bug reports on this integration piece. The server continues to process orders and parcel slips to this day.

The 3PL Provider was elated with the solution we provided, and has also brought us on for other software integrations at their warehouse.

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