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Industry: Personal protective
equipment manufacturer
Varsity Products: ShipSoft-Parcel™, ShipSoft-Freight™, ShipPack™, ShipSelect™, System21/ShipPack, Interface
Shipping Volume: 1200-1500 parcel and 35-40 freight shipments per day
Number of Shipping Locations:15 globally,
3 in the U.S.
Carrier:UPS, FedEx
ERP:Infor System21
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"We've been trailblazing and trying new things with Varsity, and we've been happy with how the system has flexed to meet our demands."
—Neale Cummiskey, Director of Logistics, North Safety Products |
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Varsity Shipping, Nutech Viewpoint, and Infor System21 Seamlessly Integrate for Complete Automation and
Improved Efficiency
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Company Background
For more than 75 years, North Safety Products has been recognized as a top-quality safety manufacturer. This global manufacturing organization provides the broadest line of personal protective equipment in the world including traffic safety, bodily, and first aid protection as well as protective footwear and disaster preparedness products. One of the largest distribution networks in the world allows their customers to purchase and receive excellent service on all products. The company has 15 manufacturing locations globally, with each location performing a unique service and producing different North products.
In the U.S., the company processes between 1200 to 1500 parcel and 35 to 40 freight shipments per day from their four facilities located in Cranston, RI, Reno,NV, Crestwood, IL, and Houston, TX.
Business Goals
The company's goals include leading the industry with a result of enhancing user safety, confidence, and productivity, providing the highest quality and most comfortable products, and supplying the most diverse product lines in safety equipment – all cost effectively and efficiently. To this end, the company's mission-critical applications – such as shipping – must enable efficient, accurate order fulfillment and tracking as well as have the flexibility, speed, and power to allow the business to grow and evolve rapidly in response to customer demand.
Challenges
North has experienced incredible growth over the years, acquiring 23 companies since 1973. As these companies were acquired, different facilities with different systems were absorbed into the company infrastructure. For shipping, this included several separate stand-alone, PC-based applications. "But these just didn't have the sophistication and intelligence that we needed for our complex shipping environment. There was a large amount of manual processing to get shipments out the door, which slowed our throughput as well as caused errors," said Neale Cummiskey, Director of Logistics at North. "We had plans to keep growing and that meant higher volumes, which we knew the existing systems couldn't handle. We had to get much more efficient and have a better process flow – and better tools – to handle this growth," continued Neale.
Solution Requirements
To address their speed and throughput requirements, North decided to first research and procure a Radio Frequency (RF) solution. The company already had an IBM System i-based ERP solution successfully in production – Infor System21 – so the company asked that user community for referrals for industry leading RF solutions that would integrate well with their ERP. After analyzing the features, functionality, and reputations of several companies, North chose Nutech's Viewpoint solution. As the North IT team began to implement the solution, opportunities for process improvement arose. Stated Neale, "We realized we had to have a ship confirm function and knew then that we needed a new shipping solution that could give us that functionality – as well as provide us with other, more sophisticated features and functionality that we were sorely short on in our existing shipping systems." North had a strong IT team, but decided to buy versus build. "We wanted the expertise of a company solely dedicated to shipping technology on the System i. And we had to mitigate any risk to the business, so we wanted to work with the leaders who had the best technology and business reputation." North also needed seamless integration between their System21 ERP, Nutech Viewpoint RF solution, and shipping system for ease of maintenance, stability, and real time access to customer order information.
Selection Process
With a list of requirements gleaned from the IT and operations teams, North began their search for a new shipping system. One in-house source mentioned Varsity Logistics as an option. From there, the team asked System21 and Viewpoint users which company they recommended. Varsity's name came up over and over again. "Once we really looked around, Varsity was really the only solution that made sense," stated Neale. "There was no way we were going to swap out our existing systems – and we didn't have to. Varsity had the flexibility to integrate with our current supply chain systems and to handle the high level of complexity and customization we had to have at the time, and knew we'd need as the company expanded," added Neale.
After visiting Varsity client, Wigwam Mills, and seeing the solutions in action, North chose Varsity ShipSoft-Parcel™, ShipPack™, ShipSoft-Freight™, ShipSelect™, HAZMAT, Export Documents, Infor System21/Varsity ShipPack two-way interface, and the FedEx Ground, UPS Domestic, and UPS International Carrier Compliance Kits for their shipping needs.
Implementation
Varsity professional services, North IT, and Nutech professional services staff worked in collaboration on the integrated system implementation. With a complex shipping environment, the company needed system flexibility. "We had to have a system that could fit our processes, not force us to fit the shipping system's limitations – we got that flexibility with Varsity," stated Neale. The implementation team completed specific customizations and modifications to enable special packing and tracing capabilities. "We have a lot to control – expiration dated products, HAZMAT, and more – which adds up to a countless number of shipping combinations. Varsity addresses all those combinations, automatically chooses the right shipping method, and captures that data during the packing process. This is absolutely invaluable," stated Neale. Additionally, the System21 ERP ship confirmation has tight specifications to accept ship confirmation data, so the implementation team altered the logic within Varsity and Viewpoint for a completely seamless flow of information between the three systems.
Results and Benefits
With North's custom developed interface between Varsity's ShipPack pack module, System21, and Nutech Viewpoint, the operator picks product with Viewpoint using RF guns and then packs product using ShipPack. The interface is configured such that the shipment won't be complete until the operator has packed exactly what was picked – efficiently and with no errors. When the order is complete, ShipPack automatically produces a ship confirm order and the data is passed back to Viewpoint and System21. From there, the product is automatically dispatched.
North's item numbers can contain many SKUs – the company has about 4000-4500 stocked SKUs and another 10,000 custom SKUs - so this new scanning process eliminates the danger of misreading data. With the Varsity solutions, operators know exactly what's in each box and are able to view that at the System i level. "The order can't ship unless it's perfect, so this solution is major accuracy tool for us and has a considerable positive impact on customer service. Our customer service reps can bring up a customer order and drill down to the item level detail. Prior to this, they didn't know what box an item was in, had to call distribution centers, look at records, check it out, and then get back to the customers. This kind of inefficiency was unconstructive toward our goals of growing the business," proclaimed Neale.
The automation provided by the system has contributed to improved efficiency and saved several person hours each day simply by eliminating the need for a staff member to manually sift through piles of papers to apply charges. Additionally, "...with the whole application ecosystem integrated, getting staff up to speed on the tools and processes is a snap. Now a person can sit at one workstation and pop from app to app seamlessly – it's so seamless that from the user perspective, it seems like one app," said Neale.
Moving forward, North is in the process of installing online tracking for UPS and Fed Ex, which will enable operators to automatically trace a shipment with the punch of one key. Additionally, the company plans to configure Varsity, Viewpoint, and System21 applications so that operators can create LTL shipments, not using the screen on the desktop, but rather on the RF scan handheld. This will give the company the ability to build pallets on an RF handheld – at the location of the pallet. "We want to have LTL product data and send that back to a handheld to process so we can get the item level detail at the pallet level. The power and sophistication of Varsity combined with Viewpoint and System21 will enable us to do this – and that will be a substantial benefit to our accuracy and productivity," said Neale.
Neale concluded, "We've been trailblazing and trying new things with Varsity, and we've been happy with how the system has flexed to meet our demands. The sense of teamwork, commitment to excellence, and focus that was brought to this implementation as well as the sophistication of the toolset has resulted in a supply chain ecosystem that we know will enable North to meet our goals of leading the industry and providing the best quality products to our customers."
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