Casestudy for 1 EDI Source by Lifetime Brands
Case Study Lifetime Brands LOCATION: Garden City, NY INDUSTRY: Retail and Manufacturing PRODUCT TYPE: Home Goods Situation With thousands of business documents being passed back and forth via EDI every day, Lifetime Brands, like so many other companies in the retail supply chain, found that supporting its internal informational needs was becoming overwhelming. “We were getting countless emails from customer service and compliance asking, ‘When can we get a copy of this purchase order? Did we send out this invoice, and was it accepted?'” said Charles Gardella, EDI and SAP programming manager at Lifetime Brands. EDI SOFTWARE: Gentran “My team was constantly cutting and pasting raw EDI data into emails and highlighting things like purchase orders, item numbers and quantities. It was pretty timeconsuming and was costing us hours in productivity,” Gardella said. BACK OFFICE SYSTEMS: SAP Solution PRIMARY USAGE OF IX: Research efficiency and chargeback dispute resolution DEPARTMENTS USING IX: EDI, compliance, customer service and purchasing Prior to IntelligentXchange, errors that resulted from a partner transmission would have to be corrected and then loaded one at a time. Now Lifetime Brands receives proactive alerts on all EDI errors and is able to correct and reload documents all at once. What’s more, the data is broken down into an easy-to-read format, allowing Lifetime Brands employees in compliance, purchasing, finance and customer service to leverage its capabilities. “When I saw that IX allowed us to see the lifecycle of a document from purchase order to invoice all on one screen, I was sold.” -Charles Gardella, EDI and SAP programming manager at Lifetime Brands. “Before he’d have to send it to compliance and wait, but since it’s now presented in a way he can understand, he can check prices, changes, etc., on his own,” said Jerry Glinnen, Director of Vendor Compliance at Lifetime Brands. He added, “The alerts and research capability allows us to identify potential issues. It also allows us to research issues in greater depth than we ever did before, because it’s all self-service, and eliminates the need to interrupt the other teams to find the data we need.” Driving Business Impact Relationships By integrating IX, Lifetime Brands has saved its Customer Service team at least 10 hours of research time each week and the Compliance Department another three to five hours. The platform also has saved the company raw dollars. Lifetime Brands has always maintained great relationships with its retailers, but IX has further strengthened and organized those connections by allowing the company to provide additional research up front when issues arise. “We have a particular retailer that requires we route orders by a specific date, but we were not sending that date down to our warehouse,” Glinnen said, adding that the problem was resulting in chargebacks multiple times per month. “Previously, if we were presented with a chargeback for a late shipment, it was very challenging to pull together the data to research the issue, so disputing it was difficult and very time consuming,” Glinnen said. “We had developers work on the warehouse management system and make a spot for that date, but we were still getting chargebacks,” he continued. “We used [ix] to research the issue and found that the programmers never finished the job-they set the date for one distribution center, but not the other. How much did it save me? I don’t know, but I don’t see the deductions coming through.” “Now with IX, if we go to dispute something with a retailer we can print the raw data as well as the English version, make a PDF, send it off to the customer and we’ve got legs to stand on,” he added. “So it saves us from embarrassment too, because when you dispute and your ducks aren’t in a row you lose your credibility.” Not only did IX help Lifetime Brands discover the problem, but it also became part of the solution. “This distribution center doesn’t use SAP, so without [ix] the only solution would be to look up that information for them ahead of time and say, ‘Hey, you’ve got this PO in your building and you need to route it by this date,'” Glinnen added.