Discuss your projectOrders, stock, and shipment status that agree across the ERP, the warehouse, and the carriers, so customers see where their order is without calling. Shorts, damage, and returns land in a queue with an owner.
Illustration of a logistics integration built by Baybloom: the ERP, the warehouse system, and the carrier kept in sync, with stock and shipment exceptions waiting for review.
COOs, operations directors, and branch leaders of distribution and logistics businesses, and the sponsors rolling them up. The operation usually already has a warehouse or transport system; what is missing is the workflow between it, the ERP, and the customer.
The workflow
The steps we see most often in this kind of operation.
What we build
Combine warehouse and carrier events into one status per order, shared with customer service and customers by email, portal, or data feed.
Route short shipments, damage, and carrier claims to an owner with the evidence attached, tracked through to resolution and credit.
Authorize returns, guide receiving and inspection, and issue credits or replacements from one record that customer service and the warehouse share.
Capture orders from EDI, portals, and email as validated orders, flagging mismatched prices or part numbers before they reach the warehouse.
Give trade customers their price lists, reorder history, order status, and delivery documents in one place, which reduces calls to inside sales.
Report fill rate, on-time delivery, and margin by branch from reconciled data, with every figure traceable to the orders behind it.
Your first release
How the work runs
We start with the people doing the work and the systems around it, then write down the first release: what it includes, what it leaves for later, the integration decisions, and the acceptance criteria. Nothing is built until that scope is agreed.
We build in releases you can review as the work takes shape, using realistic data. Every release carries tests, a security review, and documentation. Integrations are tested against real records, with exceptions visible.
Your team receives the documentation, the runbooks, and the training to run the system, and we stay on for continued engineering when you want it.
Scope and price
Every project is priced from a written scope. These are the factors that move it most.
The number of ERP, warehouse, transport, and carrier systems involved sets how many connections, mappings, and ownership rules the work requires.
Each trading partner brings its own document formats, acknowledgments, and testing cycle, so the count of EDI partners shapes the integration effort.
Branches or acquired businesses using different part numbers and units need a cross-reference and cleanup before orders and stock can be compared.
An internal exception queue is contained, while customer-facing status, ordering, and documents add sign-in, permissions, and design for external users.
Regional distributor
At a regional distributor, orders are usually entered in the ERP, picked in a separate warehouse system, and handed to carriers that track shipments in separate portals, so each status question means checking all of them. A first release treats the ERP as the record for the order and feeds pick and shipment status back into it. Short shipments, damage, and returns land in an exception queue with a named person responsible. Customers see status by email or in the existing portal, and the branch report draws on the same data. Inventory reconciliation across branches is a sensible next phase.
Deeper in this industry
Questions
What leaders in this industry ask us first.
It can be the right time, if the integration and exception workflows are designed against the new ERP. We look at the ERP plan first and scope the first release around what will not change.
Yes. EDI orders and acknowledgments are one more source and destination in the record-ownership map, and their exceptions land in the same queue.
That is the usual second phase: the same ownership rules and exception workflow applied to the acquired systems, with the branch report added to the group view.
Yes. Carrier tracking comes in through carrier APIs, aggregator services, or scheduled files, depending on what each carrier offers. The events are translated into one set of shipment statuses, so customer service reads the same language whichever carrier moved the freight.
It helps by making every movement a record with an owning system and by listing mismatches between the ERP and the warehouse. Cycle counts on a scanner or phone can follow, so discrepancies are found and fixed in the aisle instead of at a full physical inventory.
Price lists and contract terms stay owned by the ERP, and every channel reads from them. Orders arriving through EDI, the portal, or email are checked against the agreed price before release, and mismatches go to the exception queue for a person to decide.