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John P Thorpe
About John
J P Thorpe is responsible for leading solution development for BlueCrest’s global parcel sortation business. He has driven the implementation of a wide variety of automated sortation solutions to global postal providers and private organisations. His industry knowledge brings constant innovation to parcel sortation solutions needed in response to the continuous growth of e-commerce parcel volume.
Aligning data, automation, and operations objectives in system design
Opportunities to apply automation to address business challenges in order fulfillment, process validation, and multi-carrier cost savings are abundant. Understanding that no process lives in a vacuum, mapping the decisions and data flows that happen throughout the process (WMS, order assembly, rate shopping, track-and-trace, returns processing, exceptions processing) will lead to a better understanding of how systems and processes interact. This systems approach with the right automation partner can result in can lead to bigger gains to the business, and better solution business case.
Key Learnings
- First define the critical issues to address within the scope of the project: Capacity, Accuracy, Efficiency.
- Then explore the processes feeding and resulting from the process scope.
- Mapping physical and data flows can reveal hidden additional benefits that can be addressed in and through automation: Exception processing, better yield by incorporating external processes/data sources.
- Look for processes where manual processes can be incorporated into a streamlined automation flow with little incremental cost to the project.