The customer is the top priority at DHL Supply Chain. A division of DHL International GmbH, DHL Supply Chain offers warehousing and distribution services to more than 2,000 customers spanning industries, countries and sizes.
Two-way communication between those customers and DHL is core to the company’s warehouse management business, which provides both dedicated and shared warehousing options based on customer need. A customer’s ERP system must be able to interact with DHL’s systems — to notify the warehouse when goods are coming in or need to be pulled off the shelf and shipped, for example, or to exchange vital information and updates, such as availability of new product lines or delivery statuses.
Facilitating that data flow is not a one-size-fits-all task. Each customer’s data comes in different formats and follows different standards, depending upon such factors as a customer’s internal IT infrastructure, industry and location.
“For DHL, it’s really, really important for us to meet our customers’ needs. We’ve got a huge variety of customers across pretty much all of the industry verticals,” says Olly Cruickshank, Director of Product Management and Development for DHL. “And so we have to be able to accept any format our customers’ data is in and be sure the mapping tools we use can handle the transformation into our back-end systems.”
For many years, DHL built customized integration platforms each time it onboarded a new customer. It was a time-consuming, laborious and expensive process. There was very little strategy behind the integrations and very little reuse.
The division decided to bring its different integration platforms together into one system. To do so, it needed a consistent way to map its customers’ data sets to the DHL warehouse management system.