How can distributed order management Software reduce shipping expenses, double online sales and improve customer loyalty?
Let’s take a look at Town Shoes’ example. With over 60 years of experience and close to 200 locations across Canada, Town Shoes is the largest branded footwear retailer in the country. The company is comprised of 5 banners, including Town Shoes, The Shoe Company, Shoe Warehouse and DSW Canada; each of which is dedicated to delivering the best customer experience with products that embody fashion, quality and value.
Challenge
Town Shoes needed to ensure they were leveraging their inventory by efficiently pushing it along the supply chain based on customers’ demand. However, it was difficult to fulfill online requests while managing fulfillment sites and shipping costs for each order. In order to maintain profitable margins, the retailer needed a system that could automatically determine the optimal locations from which to process orders based on multiple fulfillment criteria (e.g. inventory levels, shipping address and store priority by geographic sector).
With no centralized online distribution center, Town Shoes chose to use each of its 200 stores and its 5,000 store employees to fulfill web orders. Store associates still had their in-store operations and customer service responsibilities to look after, with now an added function of picking, packing and shipping online requests. Adapting staff with ease to the new business model was imperative, and was accomplished successfully.
Solution
Vision e-DOM – Jesta’s Distributed Order Management software – enabled Town Shoes to leverage its entire catalog of in-store merchandise, making every style available online. The Jesta I.S. development team configured business rules to cover fulfillment logic and buffers to strengthen inventory accuracy. This offered real-time inventory visibility for online shoppers. When an order is confirmed packed at the store, the order management software automatically dispatches a courier for pick up. Automation and order accuracy were key to the system, allowing seamless integration within their day-to-day operation.
Results
After Go Live, Jesta’s e-DOM reduced shipping expenses by routing orders to the most cost-effective locations. This translated into a 100% increase in online sales over the same period as the previous year. Thanks to automated distribution of all online orders, Town Shoes has seen a reduction in cost-per-unit, as well as decreased labour costs at its Head Office. Jesta’s order management system empowers the organization to intelligently and efficiently fulfill online orders with enterprise-wide inventory – enabling customers to buy anywhere, fulfi ll anywhere and return anywhere.
“Over the years, Jesta I.S. has been a great partner for us. Not only have they enabled us to successfully launch DSW into Canada, they have implemented Vision STORE and Vision e-DOM across all our banners. We are on our way towards realizing our vision of offering the ‘endless aisle’ experience to our customers.” Bruce Dinan, President & CEO, Town Shoes Limited
