Out-of-Date IT Infrastructure Holding Back Middle East's 3PL Industry

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates, March 26 /PRNewswire/ --     A lack of up-to-date IT infrastructure is holding back the 3PL industry,
according to Pharma World Holdings (PWH), the first and only 3PL provider in
the GCC region.

Maher Kheder, Business Development Group Director, PWH, said surveys show
that 35% of users, or more than one in three, are dissatisfied with their 3PL
IT provisions.

Many older 3PL providers use outdated legacy systems, which leads to
compatibility problems when they try to share information with clients.

"Information sharing is seldom in sync, making processes time consuming
and costly," said Kheder.

"While newer equipment is available and the pricing of infrastructure has
decreased over the last 3-5 years, the migration process is a time consuming
task that can mean putting a stop to operations. For this reason many 3PLs
are reluctant to tackle this."

Through PWH's one-stop offering, they centralise logistics providing
storage, inventory management as well as purchasing and re-invoicing to the
distributor.

"A vendor managed inventory is all important to a 3PL in their 'middle
man' capacity. These ensure supply is in sync with demand, and allow services
such as automatic billing for storage and tasks per customer, management
reporting, flexible per customer configurations, per customer cost, and
profit and loss functions for competitive pricing.

"Our WMS also supports inventory planning and supply chain management
(SCM), order fulfillment, shipment tracking, transportation with load and
route optimisation, distribution, customer relation management (CRM), and
supplier relation management (SRM)."

The sharing of so much information inevitably leads to security and
hardware failure concerns, so the system requires constant monitoring.

"We have applied standard information technology procedures including
backup and disaster recovery planning. We also conduct external threat-risk
assessments through system penetration consultancies."

This advanced system enables automatic alerts to be sent through the
internet, email or SMS throughout the entire workflow. 3PL is designed to
save customers time and money, and regular updates further enhance this
benefit.

"With a state of the art server and network setup, warehouse operation
processes are transparent to process supervisors via wireless network and RF
units, and clients and customers can check the status of their work orders
over the internet via a secure link," said Kheder.

"Customers can even check the temperature in our warehouse from anywhere
in the world."