Expanding your parcel shipping network should accelerate your business — not slow it down. Yet for many organizations running multi-carrier operations, the process of activating a new carrier or extending an existing one to a new warehouse has long been anything but fast. Manual email chains, unclear timelines, and no visibility into progress have turned what should be a routine operational task into a source of real friction.
The latest version of QAD’s Multi-Carrier Parcel Shipping (MCPS) platform addresses this directly. With the introduction of the new Carrier Activation Portal, the target timeline for carrier activation is now less than one week — a significant step forward for operations teams managing growth across multiple facilities.
Why Carrier Activation Has Always Been Harder Than It Should Be
For manufacturing and distribution organizations, carrier activation typically occurs when opening a new warehouse, adding a shipping location, or rolling out a new carrier service. According to the APQC 2023 Supply Chain Priorities and Challenges Report — based on a survey of leaders across more than 25 industries — logistics and operational process innovation consistently rank among the top strategic priorities for supply chain executives. Yet the activation process itself has historically worked against that agility.
Before purpose-built tooling existed, the standard approach involved manual database updates, editing multiple configuration files, and a heavy reliance on institutional knowledge held by a small number of experienced engineers. The actual technical work often took as little as 30 to 45 minutes — but accessing the right people, coordinating across teams, and waiting for responses could stretch the total timeline into weeks.
The cost of low visibility
Beyond the time lost, the lack of visibility created a secondary problem: uncertainty. Operations teams had no reliable way to track where a request stood, who owned the next action, or when to expect completion. This generated unnecessary back-and-forth, strained relationships between operations and IT, and — in the worst cases — delayed facility openings and carrier launches.
Introducing the MCPS Carrier Activation Portal
The Carrier Activation Portal is a new capability in the latest MCPS release that modernizes how carrier activations are requested, tracked, and managed — without changing the underlying activation process or who performs it. QAD Services continues to execute every activation; what changes is the experience around it.
How it works
When an organization needs to activate a carrier for a new location, they submit the request directly through the portal’s guided interface. Instead of composing an email or locating the right internal contact, the requester moves through a structured form that captures the necessary configuration parameters — with default values pulled automatically from the release database.
Once submitted, the request:
▸ Generates a unique request ID for tracking
▸ Creates a ticket automatically and routes it to the appropriate QAD Services team
▸ Enters a tracked workflow with named status stages
Status visibility is one of the portal’s most significant practical improvements. Rather than waiting for an email update, requesters can monitor progress through defined stages:
| Status Stage | What it means |
| Waiting on carrier | QAD is awaiting information or confirmation from the carrier |
| Waiting on customer | The request is awaiting information from the customer |
| Pending with QAD | The request is in the QAD Services queue |
| Completed | Carrier is active and operational |
What Changes for Operations Teams
The Carrier Activation Portal delivers improvements across three dimensions that consistently surface in customer conversations about carrier expansion.
Speed
The combination of structured request submission and streamlined internal routing compresses the activation timeline to less than one week. For organizations planning warehouse openings or carrier rollouts with fixed go-live dates, this predictability is operationally significant. Gartner’s Hierarchy of Supply Chain Metrics — the industry standard framework for supply chain performance measurement — identifies schedule adherence as a core operational KPI. That target becomes more achievable when activation cycles are measured in days, not weeks.
Visibility
Knowing the status of a request at any point eliminates the need for follow-up emails and status calls. It also creates a shared record that both operations teams and QAD Services can reference, reducing the coordination overhead that previously accumulated around each activation.
Scalability
For organizations expanding into new markets or consolidating carrier relationships across multiple facilities, activation is a repeatable event. The portal makes it a structured, consistent process rather than an ad hoc one — supporting growth without adding proportional administrative complexity. The MHI Annual Industry Report consistently highlights that supply chain leaders are increasing technology investments specifically to improve this kind of operational scalability and transparency across their networks.
What the Portal Is
It is worth clarifying the scope of this capability. The Carrier Activation Portal provides customers with greater visibility and a streamlined activation experience, while QAD Services continues to manage the complete technical activation process. This includes carrier API integration, label generation, tracking ID configuration, certification, and deployment, ensuring every carrier is activated accurately, efficiently, and according to QAD best practices.
What the portal provides is a better interface for the customer-facing side of that process: structured request submission, automatic workflow routing, and end-to-end status transparency. Think of it as the operational layer that connects the customer to the QAD Services team — clearly, efficiently, and with a documented record.
How to Access the Carrier Activation Portal
The Carrier Activation Portal is available exclusively in the latest version of MCPS. Organizations currently running an older release will need to upgrade to access it.
If your team manages carrier activations regularly — or has upcoming expansion projects that depend on activating new carriers or extending existing ones to new locations — this is a compelling reason to evaluate the upgrade now rather than at the next planned review cycle.
