CIVCO Guides their Future with Varsity ShipSoft |
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CIVCO is a global specialist in the design, manufacture, and marketing of specialized medical products for the ultrasound industry and minimally invasive surgical equipment and procedures. Serving a client base of 14,000, CIVCO has an inventory of 900 SKUs and ships over 300 parcels per day with complex weights and dimensions. Their equipment is ordered via phone, fax, and the Web, then shipped from their warehouse in Kalona, Iowa.
With a promise of "guiding the future", CIVCO's equipment was fulfilling that promise—but their shipping system was falling short. Employing antiquated screen scraping technology to transfer shipping data into their Infor XA ERP, CIVCO began to feel the pain. The technology was not scalable and lacked the quality of support or documentation that was essential to CIVCO. It also could not rate shop or generate commercial invoices. Documentation, such as air bills and export documentation, was hand-written, and printed invoices had to be manually reviewed to verify that charges appeared "normal". The result: shipping charges that were either inflated or under priced. To add to the pain, there was no visibility into freight charges, allowances, and discounts. All of this added up to customer service and business processes that were suffering.
Alleviating the Pain
Unable to work with the current system any longer, CIVCO began searching for a better shipping solution. Leveraging the stability of their iSeries platform, CIVCO determined that a native iSeries shipping solution that handled both parcel and freight would give them the reliability, extensibility, and flexibility they needed. "CIVCO is a business that is expecting to grow considerably, and because of that, we needed to make sure the system we implemented was scalable enough to handle an increased client base and new functionality that we knew would come down the line," said Steve Miller, Senior Analyst at CIVCO.
Other requirements included seamless integration with Infor XA, multi-carrier capabilities that allowed for easy annual rate updates, and the ability to generate documentation for international shipments. And on the customer service (CS) side, CIVCO needed a solution that would enable rate shopping for Web and credit card orders as well as the capacity to alert customers via email regarding order status and tracking information.
After a diligent and thorough evaluation of several shipping solutions, Varsity's iSeries-based multi-carrier shipping software, ShipSoft, came out on top. To ensure they were making the right choice, CIVCO brought a Varsity staff member onsite. "Varsity did an exceptional job of assessing our current situation and listening to our requirements. But better yet, they came back to us and said they could handle all of the items on our wish list."
Immediate Benefits for Customer Service and CIVCO's Customers
CIVCO noticed benefits immediately after the implementation. "Our CS department has been one of the bigger benefactors from the implementation of ShipSoft," said Miller. "We now have the ability to rate shop and can instantly process credit card orders." Looking forward, CIVCO is preparing to tie ShipSoft directly into Web orders. With this capability, customers will be able to see their shipping charges at checkout and pay for their entire order with a credit card - without the need to speak with a CS representative.
Streamlined Shipping, Supported IT
Says Miller, "Our shipping department also quickly saw considerable positive results from the ShipSoft implementation. Operations have been greatly streamlined and we can handle our wide variety of shipments easily." Additionally, CIVCO's IT department now not only has a system that performs, but also has the documentation and 24/7 support needed so that the system is always running smoothly.
With the automation and ease of maintenance, CIVCO has seen measurable results. "We calculated about two hours per day in time savings between customer service and shipping management - and shipping charge errors are at an all time low," states Miller. "We've been able to reduce the time it takes to ship a single package by about 40%, and since installing ShipSoft, we've increased package count averages from 200 to 300 per day with zero increase in head count."
Better Shipping = Better Business
These benefits have produced more than the sum of their parts by positively impacting the overall business. Miller concludes, "Varsity's products have acted as a catalyst in improving our business. We now have a powerful, stable, and supported system that has enabled us to not only streamline and enhance our shipping process, but also translate our time and cost savings into improving other, related areas of our business process. All of this has added up to CIVCO providing the high level of customer service that our clients expect."
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