Client PortalManaged IT for warehousing and third party logistics
IT Support for Warehousing and 3PL Operations
A warehouse anywhere in Melbourne's south east is a building full of work that cannot be done at a desk, and almost every piece of technology in it was bought to solve one job rather than as part of a system. Scanners from one supplier, label printers from another, a wi-fi network that was adequate before the racking went to the ceiling.
It holds together until volume rises, and then it does not. Our work here is mostly about the unglamorous equipment that stops a pick.
Want the number first? Our pricing is published: AgileCORE from $85 and AgileCOMPLETE from $130 per user per month ex GST, plus the AgileSECURE add-on at $44. Estimate your monthly figure in two minutes, or book a conversation.
In order of how often we see it
Three things stop a warehouse, and none of them are the ones in the brochure
When we are called into a warehouse, the stated problem is almost always the warehouse management system. The actual problem is almost always one of these, and each has been quietly tolerated for long enough that the staff have built workarounds around it.
Coverage that was designed for an empty building
Wi-fi is commissioned when the racking is new and the stock profile is light, then the building fills up and the signal does not reach where the work is. Staff learn which aisles to avoid and which corner to stand in to make a scan register, and nobody reports it because it is not broken, it is just slow. It is fixed by surveying the building as it is currently loaded and designing coverage for that, including height, metal racking and the dock doors standing open.
Equipment nobody treats as equipment
Scanners, label printers, the terminal on the dock, the tablet on the forklift. Capital equipment is maintained and replaced on a schedule. This gear is replaced when it dies, usually at the worst moment, often with whatever can be delivered tomorrow, which is how a warehouse ends up with four models of scanner and no spares for any of them. We put it on a register, standardise it, keep spares, and plan replacement against your volume rather than against a failure.
People arriving and leaving faster than accounts are created and removed
Warehousing runs on seasonal peaks and labour hire, which means a stream of people who need access on their first shift and should lose it on their last. Where that is a manual job it gets done at the start and skipped at the end, so the account list grows a long tail of people who no longer work here. That is both a security problem and a licensing cost, and it is one of the easier things to put right permanently.
A point worth being blunt about
Your operation starts hours before most support arrangements do
Picking starts early and despatch runs late, so a failure at 5am is not an early problem, it is a problem in the middle of your day. A support arrangement written around office hours will technically meet its obligations and still cost you a morning.
We set support hours and the out of hours path in the agreement before you sign it, so you know what you have bought. Monitoring under AgileCOMPLETE runs around the clock regardless, which is what catches the overnight failure that would otherwise be discovered by the first person to scan something.
If you store for other businesses
A third party logistics operator is holding a customer's business, not just their stock
Your customers' order data, their customer addresses, their volumes and in many cases their commercial terms all sit in your systems. That is a trust position, and the larger your customers get, the more formally they will ask you to demonstrate it.
The questionnaires are predictable, which is the good news. Multi-factor authentication, managed devices, patching, backups, who has access, what happens if you are compromised. We hold the evidence, so the answers are factual, and where a control is missing we tell you and put a date against it instead of wording around it.
Usually asked, rarely ready
- Can you separate one customer's data from another's
- Who in your business can see a customer's order history
- When was a restore of the warehouse system last tested
- How quickly does a departing casual lose access
- What is the plan if the system is unavailable for a full shift
AgileSECURE delivers these controls aligned to the SMB1001 maturity framework, and our compliance obligations page sets out what applies to Victorian businesses.
Scope
What we take responsibility for
Agreed in writing on day one in a Responsibility and Accountability Matrix.
The building as a technical environment
Coverage surveyed and designed for full racking, height and open dock doors, cabling and switching that suits a shed rather than an office, and the dock, the mezzanine and the office treated as one network.
The operational equipment
Scanners, label printers, dock terminals and forklift tablets on a register, standardised, held as spares and replaced on a plan. The warehouse system's platform monitored around the clock, backed up and restored as a test rather than as a theory.
People, access and security
Joining and leaving handled as a process rather than a favour, named accounts, multi-factor authentication, and the monitoring and controls your customers are starting to ask about in writing.
Published pricing
AgileMANAGED: structured IT from $85 per user / month
We publish our pricing because an operator who quotes storage and handling to the cent deserves to know the number before the first meeting, not after the third.
AgileCORE
Remote support, monitoring, security baselines and Microsoft 365 management. Suits an operation whose building and systems are already in good order.
View AgileCORE →AgileCOMPLETE
Everything in CORE, plus onsite support, managed servers with 24/7 monitoring, and quarterly business reviews. The usual fit where a shift is running and a dock is working.
View AgileCOMPLETE →Where we work
Based in Mornington, working the south eastern warehouse belt
Agile IT Solutions has been based in Mornington since 2007. Several of the operations we look after sit among the sheds around Keysborough, close enough that a coverage survey or a dock problem is a visit rather than a project. Most issues are resolved remotely, and onsite support across our service area is included with AgileCOMPLETE.
If you would rather see how we work before talking about your own operation, our case studies set out what we actually did and what changed.
Questions
IT questions from warehouse operators
Our wi-fi works in some aisles and not others. Do we need more access points?
Possibly, but not until somebody has measured it. Coverage in a warehouse changes with the stock profile, so a design that worked when the racking was half empty fails when it is full, and adding access points to the wrong places can make it worse rather than better. We survey the building as it is currently loaded, design for the work that has to happen in it, and tell you what it costs before anything is bought.
Do you support our warehouse management system?
We do not write it and we are not its consultant. We take responsibility for everything underneath it: the platform it runs on, the database, the backups, the devices and the network, and the vendor relationship when something needs escalating. When the fault sits in the application, we deal with that vendor rather than handing you back a ticket number.
We take on casuals at short notice. Can access keep up?
Yes, and it should work in both directions. Joining is set up as a standard process so a new person has what they need on their first shift without anyone improvising, and leaving removes access on the day rather than when somebody remembers. The second half is the one that is usually missing, and it is the half that matters for security and for what you are paying in licences.
What happens if the system is down for a whole shift?
That is decided in advance rather than during. We work out what you cannot operate without, what the manual fallback is, and how long you can run on it, then build and test a recovery path that matches. A business that knows it can pick on paper for four hours makes calm decisions during an outage. One that has never discussed it does not.
Our customers audit us. Will you deal with their questions?
Yes. We answer the technical sections of customer security questionnaires and audits directly, because we hold the configuration and the evidence. Where something they ask for is not in place, you get told before they do, with a plain view of what it would take to close it.
How do we get started?
A discovery conversation and a walk through the building, ideally while it is working rather than while it is quiet. We work out what you run on today, how it is managed and where the gaps are, then set out what a structured managed service would look like. No obligation and no quote pushed at you in the first meeting.