ABOUT WATCO

Supply Chain Experts Specializing in Logistics

Watco is a full-service third-party logistics (3PL) company that provides rail, transloading, terminal and port, and logistics services. The company operates in industrial 3PL storage, handling bulk commodities and materials such as sand, aggregate, and steel. The 3PL provider, which is headquartered in Kansas, employs nearly 5,000 team members across approximately 70 facilities.  

The enterprise offers a selection of integrated services, such as: 

• Transloading, including cargo handling at marine and rail terminals 
• Industrial development, including securing government funding 
• Permitting, including land, track, and building leasing 
• Construction management, including cost estimating and budgeting 
• Engineering and design, specializing in track and terminal projects 
• Supply chain solutions and logistics for all modes of transportation 

Operational success and cohesion are highly reliant on the management software Watco chooses to employ. The company must adequately maintain a unified system across a vast and diverse facility network and also account for nontraditional inventory types. Deployment had to be swift and as smooth as possible, with the potential for expansion to additional terminals in the future.  

“Whenever you bring in a new system and you’re going to train users on a new system, it presents you with an opportunity to take a minute step back and really think about the way that you’re doing things and the way that you could be doing things,” Justin Marr, Vice President of Business Solutions at Watco, said.  

THE CHALLENGE

Standardizing Operations Across Dozens of Facilities

Watco needed a system that offered real-time inventory visibility, mobile compatibility, and versatile integrations to align all of its facilities. Its existing management processes involved manual spreadsheets and gathering information from various sources, causing discrepancies, service delays, and internal headaches.  

 

Watco needed software that it could easily customize, was flexible, and would meet the needs of its diverse clientele, including different contract terms and billing scenarios. Most importantly, it needed to be fully integrated to allow for standardization across all locations. 

 

Although the general service offerings of each facility are similar, different locations still have slightly varying needs, which the chosen database must account for. The company needed to standardize data entry as much as possible while maintaining the ability to customize the interface in a way that was conducive to each individual facility’s work. It also required an integrated billing module that could generate billing events automatically based on transactional tasks that were in progress. 

 

“All of our facilities—65-plus—are on one common application, and that was not the case before,” Marr said. “Some terminals used one application; other terminals used a different application. So it was very difficult to look at things holistically from an enterprise-wide perspective.” 

THE SOLUTION

A Combination of Standardization & Customization

Watco put together a core team of cross-functional staff members to evaluate the different product offerings in the market. The ultimate decision to go with Datex® and Footprint® WMS is attributed to the system’s ease of implementation, customization potential, and robust integrated accounting module.

Watco collaborated with the Datex® team to design dashboards from scratch in the WMS for key operational functions, leveraging the intuitive interface to create and modifyscreens quickly based on client feedback. These customizable dashboards present teams with only essential information, illustrating a logical flow based on the way the team member enters information into the system. 

While Watco’s previous system essentially just captured data without aggregating it, Footprint® WMS keeps track of every transaction that’s made and task that’s completed. With a clear view of what was done, by whom, and when, this detailed historical data makes troubleshooting and identifying discrepancies much simpler.  

As desired, the new system could suitably house customer contracts by loading the specific details of each one into the program—this data would be the foundation for the automated billing functionalities and inventory transparency, Marr mentioned. The Watco team leverages the necessary transactional data to build scorecard metrics internally around productivity and cost revenue, providing visibility into throughput and how it relates to revenue capture.  

“Things like inventory accuracy are never solved—it’s a constant discipline,” Marr said. “What drew us to Datex® was the application itself. We needed something very flexible, very open. The Footprint® WMS application was the leader in that by far.” 

THE RESULTS

Speed, Reliability, & Stability Where Watco Needs It Most

To address concerns about scalability, Watco eventually deployed an additional trainer to help double the number of terminals transitioned each month. 

According to Watco, some key operational benefits the company experienced with Footprint® WMS are: 

• High speed of adoption (transitioned 52 terminal facilities across the U.S. in 12 months) 
• A streamlined user interface that simplifies the data entry process, including logical data entry flow 
• Low-code customization of screens 
• Robust user access controls, including implementation of single sign-on access 
• Dashboarding and alerting widgets embedded within user interface screens 
• Extremely fast deployment (or “publishing”) of new designs to production 
• Creation of an “Orders Hub” homepage, a one-stop shop for all Watco customer service representative users 

The customer portal—a key feature of Footprint® WMS—gives customers lots of flexibility by providing them with a designated place they can go to access necessary reports, run queries, and manage data in real time. The company has plans to continue onboarding customers to the portal to expand individual account management capabilities, providing clients with more visibility into their operations. 

“[Footprint® WMS] really has improved our efficiency, and it’s really improved our accuracy,” Marr said. “The application allowed us to really hone in and create screens from a clean slate, knowing exactly what our users need. [And for] the team members in the field that do a lot of data entry into the system, it’s saving them a tremendous amount of time and improving accuracy.”