PACER’S DISTRIBUTION ARM IMPLEMENTS LOGIMAX
Pacer Distribution Services (PDS), Inc., the warehousing and distribution arm of Pacer International, Inc. (Nasdaq:PACR), said it has acquired and implemented an integrated, advanced warehouse management system (WMS) from Logimax, replacing older legacy systems.The new system, which has been customized to support Pacer’s value-added operations in Southern California, provides 24-hour web-based customer reporting and full inventory management capabilities, including radio frequency (RF) and barcoding, according to Kent Prokop, president of PDS.
He said it also positions the company to offer RFID (radio frequency identification) services with minimal additional cost and effort.
Prokop said virtually all of Pacer’s existing warehouse customers have been transitioned to the new WMS system, and that the company is successfully handling record volumes of Asian imports through its warehousing and cross-dock facilities in the Los Angeles – Long Beach region, the nation’s principal gateway for Asian freight.
He noted that inbound container flows through the Los Angeles gateway, on an industry-wide basis, were up by 11.3 percent during the first half of the year.
“Importers and distributors are already benefiting from improved functionality and inventory visibility,” said Prokop.
According to Prokop, installation of the new WMS has helped prepare Pacer to better handle rapidly escalating inbound freight volumes in the future. “We are also better prepared to meet customer demands for increasingly complex value-added services, and the strict compliance requirements of today’s large big-box retailers in such areas as EDI, systems integration, and UCC labeling.” He added that PDS expects the added functionality will attract additional business.
PDS operates more than 800,000 square feet of warehousing and cross-dock capacity in the Los Angeles area, providing such services as consolidation, deconsolidation, transloading and cross-dock operations, order fulfillment, sorting and labeling, product manipulation, and even in-house drayage (local trucking). Its affiliates in the Pacer group also provide rail and truck brokerage, intermodal transportation, ocean services, and other supply-chain services.
The Logimax warehouse management system was developed by ICS, a global software development and systems implementation firm specializing in supply-chain technology solutions.