Inventory Management Solution: Direct Sales Company’s Inventory

Retail Solutions Online (press release) - Erie,PA,USA
In many ways Sundance reflects the image of Robert Redford, who founded its
catalog business in 1989 and still retains a close interest and ownership
in the ...

In many ways Sundance reflects the image of Robert Redford, who founded its catalog business in 1989 and still retains a close interest and ownership in the firm. Sundance provides top quality, southwestern motif products including jewelry, apparel, furniture and other goods for the home. Sundance began as strictly a catalog sales company, though the Internet soon became an important channel and now accounts for 45% of revenues. Still the company employs direct sales only, and fulfills nearly all orders from an inventory that averages 5000 products and 25000 SKUs.

In the past, Sundance’s planners relied on a mix of paper documents, spreadsheets, mainframe-based ordering and fulfillment tools - and too often their own memories - to try to keep inventories at proper levels. As business grew, these disparate tools and methods fell further and further short of the mark and it showed on the bottom line. With all the manual steps errors were far too frequent. Out-of-stock and excess inventory situations grew increasingly prevalent, and too often Sundance had to rely on the patience of its loyal customers. At one point inventory turns dropped to 1.2, with equally unacceptable fill rates and backorder levels. To make things worse, communications gaps forced inventory planners to operate with too little information from the other departments involved in running offers - Marketing and Merchandising.

Hagen and the IT Department worked with Direct Tech to correct integration challenges so that Forecast*21 could utilize Sundance’s overall IT infrastructure and mainframe- based data. Then he asked Direct Tech to provide help of several kinds:

* support IT with the integration effort
* conduct training for both users and system administrators
* analyze Sundance’s inventory practices and recommend ways to improve them, focusing especially on ways to hurdle inter-department communications barriers




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