About Maidenform Inc. (USA)
Maidenform, headquartered in Bayonne, New Jersey (US), is a U.S.$250 million company. The company has been manufacturing and supplying women’s intimate apparel for over 80 years. Over that time, the company has expanded to provide clothing under other brand names as well. Maidenform also supplies products to several well-known intimate apparel retailers as part of its private label business. Tracking multiple production processes is therefore a crucial element of the company's business. Delivering goods to market requires that Maidenform have a highly reliable distribution system, as well.

Challenge

Way back in 1991, when Eclipse System got in touch with Maidenform, it was using some internally developed software to keep record of its inventory transaction. The entire warehouse operation was manual and WMS market had not matured that time. Entire operation in warehouses was manually handled and their paper-based warehousing system contributed to low inventory accuracy and customer service. They were not able to cope with the growing business demands hence wanted to automate the distribution centre processes.

Solution 

In the first phase, Eclipse Systems implemented the outbound module of DCMS which ensured  that sufficient checks are provided in the shipping process in order to eliminate the chances of under/over picking, wrong shipments. By verifying the items and carton contents, Maidenform eliminated the errors in customer orders and simplified the employee’s work as they now simply need to scan the barcode to identify the customer order and SKU and quantity ordered. This generated shipping accuracy and the system helped them saving 1% of the total revenue.

Subsequently DCMS helped the Maidenform in many areas like Receiving, QC, Locating, Order Processing and saved lot of company’s revenue. With new feature and automation of every operation, Maidenform began to experience some significant operations improvements and cost savings. The receiving and put-away process improved dramatically.

In subsequent upgradation phase, Eclipse implemented Ring scanner Project. Now using the Radio Frequency (RF) terminals, DCMS manages the warehouse functions in the most efficient manner. It performs instant verification of operator entry and allows for the correction of errors while the worker is still performing the current task. This verification ensures accuracy and prevents the errors that cause productivity lapses and poor customer service. The real-time nature of the system promotes productivity by allowing the software to guide workers through their tasks based on accurate inventory quantities and locations.

The Process Flow chosen for Warehouse operations is the main determinant of how effectively a Warehouse can perform. Compared to the current system, many of the redundant steps have been eliminated. Now the same work could be accomplished in lesser steps as compared to long processes which resulted in lesser resources and optimal utilization of existing ones thereby leading to cost savings. 

With the paper-based system, warehouse staff was only able to pick one order at a time. DCMS wave picking features allow pickers to process several orders at a time, increasing efficiency and productivity levels. With DCMS, pickers are also able to pack products directly into final shipping cartons, cutting steps out of the order fulfillment process – another boost for productivity levels. Further, because of the visibility offered by the WMS, Maidenform can now tell a customer exactly where their order is in the cycle.

The system automatically generates replenishment requests as empty space in shelf stock becomes available. DCMS sets a minimum and maximum limit for each shelve area and the moment the system get to know that the inventory is about to reach the minimum required level, it generates replenishment request and guides the puller to pull required no of SKU pieces from the particular box on the basis of FIFO rules or any other user defined rules. By default, the system enforces the FIFO rule for pulling i.e. it chooses to pull old cartons first, thereby preventing staling of inventory.

DCMS also supports Optimized Pulling Activity that means the system uses best path algorithm to generate Pulling lists. Also the system supports both source and destination pulling

With DCMS implementation, it is now easy to do a physical count of the inventory as locations in the forward pick area are numbered and system keeps track of how many pieces are there in each location. This makes the year-end physical inventory process much simpler.

The system provides Quality Control Checks at various stages of the process/operations to maintain accuracy. These have been provided to check and control discrepancies arising out of any mismatch against any set procedure or standards..

DCMS also started providing productivity reports which were used by supervisors for calculating incentives for pickers and pullers. Also provide reports which capture the standard time involved in performing a particular job and measuring the time taken by the concerned DC employee and if a mistake is made or any inefficiency the same can be pinpointed to an exact task.

GUESS? Inc., founded in 1981, is recognized as one of the global fashion industry's most prestigious and innovative organizations. GUESS? Inc., markets, distributes and licenses lifestyle collections of apparel and accessories for men, women and children. GUESS? Merchandise is distributed worldwide through GUESS?, Inc. retail stores, in-store shops located in other retailers and Licensees. The company sells its products through its own stores to a network of wholesale accounts, and through the Internet.

Challenge

Guess Canada Retail was not happy with the performance of their existing software system installed at their warehouse located at Montreal (Canada) at that time. They were having more than 75,000 SKU’s/line items that were required to be managed. They were not able to track the inventory properly which resulted in delayed order shipment. Moreover they required intelligent order processing software that could take care of all customer specific constraints at the time of order picking n packing.

Another major requirement was the customized documents to be printed which need to be accompanied with the orders. The existing system was error prone as managers had to remember to print specific format for each order. Lot of human intervention was required and still it was prone to errors and was time consuming.  

Moreover the company use to hire workers on contract basis and cannot afford to spend much on Software training of new employees and hence was looking for user friendly WMS software with least training requirement.  

This was one part of the story. The company was also looking for several other features to improve their existing warehouse operations.

Objective

The company was looking for a pick n ship module of Warehouse software. They wanted to capture the inventory information with the use of their handheld batch scanners which the major source of information for warehouse software in picking the order.

Solution 

They were on a lookout for a cost effective solution with faster implementation. DCMS made it possible and client achieved several benefits within first few months. Few of them are listed below: 

• Improved Inventory visibility and tracking.

• All the customer specific constraints at the time of order picking (min/max pieces per box, single SKU per box, etc) were taken care by DCMS itself without human intervention.

• DCMS supported Partial Order Picking and Shipping.

• The Client required the flexibility to undership the order as many times they were shipping to their own retail stores.

• The Clients’ earlier reporting system was hectic and lengthy. DCMS supports web based reporting system which gave the higher management the complete transparency in warehouse operations.

• DCMS is designed to be self managing and operators start using the system on very first day with minimum learning instructions, hence the client saved the additional expenditure on training.

• DCMS is fast in responding and hence improved the productivity and efficiency as compared to old system which was very slow.

• The checking module provided 100% accuracy to orders being shipped and hence less chargeback.

• Automatic printing of custom documents as per the customer specific format. Now the managers are not required to remember to print the document and their respective format. The moment the order picking and packing is complete DCMS automatically prints the document and labels.