October 2016

Beacon Partners signs anchor tenant at Metrolina Park

Charlotte-based Beacon Partners has signed its anchor tenant at Metrolina Park, a master-planned industrial park on a former fairgrounds site in north Charlotte.

Bonded Logistics, a third-party logistics company headquartered in Charlotte, will lease 371,895 square feet in Building 2, at 5224 Gibbon Road, in the park. The 95-acre site along Statesville Road was formerly home to Metrolina Expo before Beacon Partners purchased the property in June. When built out, Metrolina Park will have 1.2 million square feet of manufacturing and logistics space.

Privately-owned Bonded Logistics integrates warehousing, packaging and transportation logistics to offer customized supply chain solutions. Established in 1972, Bonded Logistics has grown from one 30,000-square-foot facility to more than 2 million square feet of public, contract and leased space in 13 locations, with more than 300 employees across its footprint.

Bonded Logistics and Beacon Partners have a 20-year relationship, with Bonded having leased space in several buildings owned and managed by Beacon Partners.

“We are very excited to expand our warehousing footprint here in Charlotte,” said Scott Carr, president of Bonded Logistics, in a statement. “The city has become a major hub in the Southeast for companies in need of logistics services. This building is a perfect location as it sits next to several of our other facilities, creating a campus atmosphere that encompasses over 750,000 square feet.”

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Glass Warehouse Initiative – Visibility in Shipping Orders

By Dave Jesse, COO

I’m excited to continue to break down the blueprint behind our Glass Warehouse Initiative with my third of four posts on the topic. If you haven’t already read the initial press release (click here) or my first or second post (click here), I would encourage you to read these first to better understand what I am discussing. If you are skipping ahead, our Glass Warehouse Initiative was developed to give our clients valuable insight into the logistics we provide for their supply chain. It breaks down into three key areas of focus – systems, technology, and data. Each plays an integral part in creating visibility throughout our facilities, from receiving and shipping to managing inventory and data analytics.

What I will focus on for this third post will be how the Glass Warehouse Initiative enables our clients to have visibility into fulfillment and shipping orders. Shipping orders out of our facilities starts with the robust systems we’ve put in place. Utilizing Cadence, our WMS (warehouse management system) from Cadre Technologies, dedicated CSR’s (customer service reps) process and release orders as they come from various ERP systems such as Oracle and SAP or via email or even phone calls. Our WMS confirms the products being picked are available, creates a physical picklist for the order, prepares any shipping labels for printing, and waves the order to a wireless RF-gun. It also provides visibility through our customer web portal, BLI Web, that the order has been received and is in the fulfillment process.

Order pickers on a forklift head out to our Wi-Fi-enabled warehouse floor with an RF-gun in hand. The WMS determines the most efficient pick path to pick everything needed to fulfill the order as quickly as possible. When the picker arrives at each location, he scans the location Mu (see first blog post) and confirms the quantity he is picking for the order. This instantly updates in Cadence WMS and BLI Web, providing visibility of available inventory to the customer. Once that has been done for each item, the order is dropped in the proper shipping lane and the shipping lane bar code is scanned confirming the order is now ready for loading. When the entire order is picked, our WMS automatically generates a packlist with all the products on the order and changes the order status to COMPLETE in BLI Web. Based upon customer requirements, customized shipping labels are created to meet client’s standards or vendor compliance and placed with the order.

It’s the responsibility of the quality control checker on the loading dock to systematically double-check everything on the order dropped off by the picker. They do a full account of everything by verifying the packlist against what’s on the dock as well as ensuring all labeling is correct. Currently, this is done with a mix of manual procedures and tablet technology, with a full transition to tablets by early 2017 to further streamline the process.

The final part of shipping orders is the movement of the orders onto the trailers. Trucks typically arrive through scheduling by Bonded Transportation or our client’s carrier. With the trailer at the dock door, our loaders scan the label on the pallet and then scan the dock door to confirm the correct trailer. Once complete, a VICS bill of lading (BOL) is printed to confirm what is on the trailer, who it’s from, and where it is going. This is signed by the driver and returned to us so we can update Cadence and BLI Web that the order has shipped. Each BOL is then scanned using state-of-the-art copiers that identify and match the BOL with the order using OCR (optical character recognition) technology. This allows our clients immediate visibility to shipment and tracking information through BLI Web.

Inventory demand data is analyzed monthly to assign velocity codes to all items in the warehouse. We utilize this data to help determine the best layout of the warehouse by looking at velocity and placing inventory in the optimal locations for picking. What our clients like to see is not only the order velocity but also geographic location of shipments, transportation analytics, and gauging inventory levels based on slow and fast moving sku’s. This allows them to better manage their transportation spend and make sure product is available so orders can be processed quickly.

Does your logistics’ partner offer up this kind of visibility when shipping out orders? If not, reach out to us so we can start a conversation about how we can help.

Bonded Logistics Packs 6,000 Shoeboxes for Operation Christmas Child

CHARLOTTE, NC (October 13, 2016) – Bonded Logistics, a privately-owned global third-party logistics (3PL) provider, packed a company-record 6,000 shoeboxes during its annual Operation Christmas Child outreach event held last Saturday. This was due in large part to the over 100 employees and family members that volunteered for the Samaritan’s Purse project, which delivers the shoeboxes to needy children affected by war, poverty, natural disaster, famine, and disease.

“What a great turnout for our fourth annual Operation Christmas Child packing party,” stated Scott Carr, President of Bonded Logistics. “It’s amazing to see the growth from the effort we’ve put into this project each year. This is an extremely worthy cause that we are helping with, and we couldn’t be more proud of our results. This project is incredibly important to us as an organization, and we are humbled and honored for the opportunity to be able to provide these shoeboxes for children in need. Special thanks to my sister Barbara (Carr Woodall) for working so hard to put this together, the Bonded Outreach Team, and everyone who came out and volunteered their time to help.”

This marks the fourth year in a row that Bonded Logistics has participated in Operation Christmas Child, with a total of 13,000 shoeboxes packed to-date. Bonded’s Community Outreach Team, led by Executive Vice President Barbara Carr Woodall, started ordering supplies in March to ensure everything arrived in time for the pack-out. Shoeboxes this year packed for boys and girls included 18 items such as socks, a shirt, a toothbrush, crayons, a notepad, coloring pages, a stuffed animal, and several toys. Employees and family members spent the morning at Bonded Pac, the contract packaging division of Bonded Logistics, working assembly stations and packaging lines, just as the facility functions every day when working on projects for its clients.

Operation Christmas Child is a project of Samaritan’s Purse, an international Christian relief and evangelism organization headed by Franklin Graham. Since 1993, Operation Christmas Child has collected and delivered more than 135 million gift-filled shoeboxes to children in more than 150 countries and territories. More than 500,000 volunteers worldwide—with more than 150,000 of those in the United States—are involved in collecting, shipping and distributing shoeboxes.

“This event at Bonded just keeps growing and growing,” said Keith Burney, Regional Director – Carolinas for Operation Christmas Child and Samaritan’s Purse. “These boxes are going to the darkest corners of the world. We’ve got partners in these countries that are able to share the good news through these boxes to the children in those areas. These boxes are changing lives, changing families, and changing communities. We want to thank everyone at Bonded for participating in Operation Christmas Child.”

National Collection Week for Operation Christmas Child is scheduled for November 14-21. If you are interested in donating time or items to be used in the boxes, visit www.samaritanspurse.org/occ.