Overview: Integrating fulfillment services providers (3PL)

The term Fulfillment refers to the complete order processing - from the receipt of the order to the shipment of the goods to your end customers. Of course, you can take care of all these steps yourself. Depending on your business model, it makes sense to outsource these processes. For this, there is a wide selection of fulfillment and logistics service providers who take care of exactly these parts of your business for you. So depending on your needs, these companies are in charge of the storing, picking, packaging and shipping of the goods. Some providers even handle the returns management for you. This way, they are an interface between you and your end customers, which is why this business area is also known as Third Party Logistics (3PL).

The following diagram shows how the integration of such a third party system works in combination with Xentral:

For communication with fulfillment service providers and other third-party systems, Xentral includes the Transfers module. You need this module to exchange data with the fulfillment service provider. Usually, all necessary data such as orders, products, stocks are exchanged between you and your fulfillment service provider's system via a shared server. To set up this data exchange, some preparatory settings in Xentral are necessary. Once these steps are completed, the data exchange and the corresponding logistics processes are almost done by themselves. With a wide range of setting options and the overview of ongoing data exchange in Xentral, you keep control of your stock movements and the status of your deliveries in your daily business.

The Xentral Transfers module supports a wide range of possible transfer types and file formats. Below, we have compiled a list of the most important technical data.

The following transfer types are can be used with the Transfers module in Xentral:

The Transfers module contains a variety of possible file formats that you can use to transfer data. The majority of use cases involve CSV and XML formats for collaboration. The following is a list of file formats that are provided by default.