THE CLIENT:
Our client is a top multi-channel, direct to consumer company with more than 100 years in business. They offer a wide range of affordably priced, hard to find and exclusive products for home and garden, health and beauty, apparel, hobbies, and accessories. Since 1997, the client has smoothly transitioned from primarily catalog sales to a top internet retailer. In the past few years, the company acquired several new brands blending them into the existing ecosystem further extending the quantity and quality of products for sale.
THE BUSINESS NEED:
The addition of a new brands with loyal customers coupled with increasing American preference for e-commerce shopping, our client faced a dramatic upswing in online traffic. They engaged Geneca to repair and redesign their e-commerce site to handle increased traffic. Over a 12-month period, the average daily order total increased from 1,200 to 12,000. Although the e-commerce system could smoothly take in 10 times more online orders, the company now struggled with restocking and order fulfillment. Systems—both human and computer—that worked perfectly at the lower order average were now stressed and breaking. The company needed analysis of the entire digital ecosystem and a plan for the future.
WHAT GENECA DID:
The initial step for Geneca was to look and listen. We started with existing maps of all the systems in the company. As they had several recent acquisitions, each company came with both software and processes. Additionally, the parent company had their own mix of custom and off-the-shelf software and a set of processes and workflow in place. As we mapped the computer ecosystem, we interviewed individuals in roles from sales, customer service, warehouse management, accounting, and every other department. Adding the voice of the user to the maps of the systems allowed us to provide leadership with the full breadth of their challenges.
In partnership with leadership, we built a roadmap for a systems integration for the entire enterprise. The initial win was to remove manual data entry between systems which provides both a decrease in employee time and frustration from retyping orders from one system to the next and an increase in reliability as human entry typos are removed from the process. Next up was removal of any redundant systems from the acquisitions. There is no need for in-house technical teams to need to support multiple accounting, inventory, and other applications.
While Geneca worked on the systems integration, the client business team worked to create their own move forward plan. The quick growth had flipped leadership into a reactive mindset and they needed to reset and start proactively designing how they wanted the overall business to work. For example, some fulfilment centers had a mix of products from all brands and others were still dedicated to their own original brand. The team needed to decide how to structure inventory intentionally for optimization. During this process, they determined the decision-making data that would need to be a part of their leadership dashboard.
As leadership refined their plan, Geneca moved into creation of a data dashboard with different views and modules for various roles within the organization. Each user needed to be able to easily see the correct data for their workflow whether it was a warehouse worker seeing their orders to pick to a senior buyer tracking up-to-the-minute inventory against purchase order real-time tracking. Accompanying the dashboards, we created a customizable report system giving management the ability to easily access and report on data across the entire enterprise ecosystem.
THE RESULTS:
By the end of the redundancy step of the plan, the savings realized from centralizing systems and removing no longer needed subscriptions would pay for the entire project within 16 months. That reduced spend was far more than the company anticipated. Initial employee annoyance at having to learn a new system was quickly replaced by delight as daily tasks were far easier to complete and Geneca trainers were able to demonstrate to each team how their own complaints were addressed and fixed. Employee delight in the personalized dashboards far exceeded expectations.
The final challenge came as the company acquired another new brand 5 months after completion of the full roadmap. Leadership had a clear onboarding plan that covered everything from technology transition to warehouse integration. The marketing team confidently created campaigns knowing the e-commerce site and the entire organization could deliver on the increased traffic. After the launch of the new brand, sales increased an additional 2,500-3,500 orders daily and leadership reported a smooth and satisfying acquisition.