New Control Tower functionality reduces the complexity of domestic and international shipments, while improving delivery tracking, invoicing and reporting

London, UK, 30 September 2014 – The MetaPack Group, the leading provider of eCommerce technology delivery services, today announced the addition of Control Tower to its existing product portfolio to provide retailers with greater visibility and more powerful control of international and other complex delivery processes. The ability to more accurately monitor and manage domestic and international shipments helps remove uncertainties for consumers and enables retailers to take proactive steps to alleviate potential delivery issues and provide a better customer experience to consumers.

The integration of Control Tower with MetaPack’s Delivery Management platform is a direct benefit of the company’s recent acquisition of ABOL Software, a leading provider of multi-carrier shipping software in North America.

“The acquisition has enabled us to further expand our product portfolio with Control Tower, to allow retailers to maximise on their international strategy. We are committed to providing the tools to alleviate the pressure of growing into new markets, allowing retailers to ship globally and compete locally,” said Patrick Wall, Founder and CEO of MetaPack.

As retailers are increasingly shipping globally, adding more countries to meet international consumer demand, the process for shipping internationally is becoming more and more complex. This year almost a third of UK retailers (31%) have reported over 50% growth of international online sales (source: IMRG). This trend, coupled with the rapid growth of alternative delivery methods, such as click & collect and same day service, has forced many retailers to adopt a variety of shipping methods and carrier relationships on an international and domestic level. In this complex delivery ecosystem, retailers are finding it increasingly difficult to understand exactly where their shipments are and whether any issues are likely to arise.

MetaPack’s Control Tower technology effectively addresses these challenges via four key elements that link together seamlessly, enabling businesses to Track, Alert, Report and Invoice on the full end to end parcel journey. These capabilities are available as a software-as-a-service (SaaS) system:

Tracking: Control Tower supports various international shipping models such as Direct Injection, Parent & Child and Break Bulk solutions, allowing accurate representation of what is actually happening to each and every parcel. The system can track deliveries across multiple operations and time zones and provides accurate status updates in local time.
Alerting: Control Tower includes a state of the art alerting system that is fully customisable to each retailer based on a number of variables. For instance, Control Tower can generate specific alerts at defined trigger points that can be channelled to either the internal teams or directly to consumers. This allows failed dispatches to be managed more proactively and improves the efficiency of delivery management operations.
Dashboard and Reporting: Control Tower allows each retailer to fully customise the reports that are generated on a granular event based tracking level and integrate these into the MetaPack reporting system. This customisation of the dashboard ensures the right data is being seen by the right people, allowing fast and accurate decisions to be made.
Invoicing: The Control Tower utilises all of the tracking data and information to provide invoice reconciliation and processing and reduce the administrative effort required for managing multiple invoices.