Forefront Fashion* is a Dallas, Texas based online retailer of women’s apparel. Forefront Fashion’s offerings are very wide ranging from sizes, styles, and color options. While having such a large offering is good for their customers, it posed a significant barrier to running their business in an effective and efficient manner in terms of shipping, storage, and order fulfillment.
Forefront Fashion was finding it increasingly difficult to both receive and sort the thousands of inbound items in a timely manner. As a result of this inefficiency, Forefront Fashion was experiencing increased out-of-stock items, slow order fulfillment times, and an elevated level of orders going into backorder status. In addition to fulfillment issues, they were also experiencing logistical issues that were compounding their problems. Increased detention times, unnecessary demurrage fees, and delayed drayage processes were also on Forefront Fashion’s list of concerns to tackle. Subsequently, Forefront Fashion approached Quality Logistics Systems in hopes of being able to address several of these problems and help create a more profitable business structure.
Quality Logistics Systems and their team were able to sit down with Forefront Fashion’s management and build a custom logistics solution to alleviate the issues at hand and allow the management and staff of Forefront Fashion to focus on the most important part of their business, taking care of their customers. The team at Quality Logistics Systems assembled a plan that would allow Forefront Fashion to receive and inventory most of their incoming stock upon arrival. Forefront Fashion’s products would be brought directly to Quality Logistics Systems’ Dallas warehouse and would be immediately sorted, inventoried, stored, and recorded in QLS’ Warehouse Management System through their Weblink Portal. This would allow management to know instantly what inventory they had on hand without having fulfillment staff break from their hired tasks to bring the items in house, thus saving bottom line labor costs and providing a more efficient system. Additionally, through the QLS Weblink Portal, Forefront Fashion’s management could view current inventory based upon size, color, style, purchase order, and many other criteria at any given point in time.
Through the Weblink Portal, Forefront Fashion would now be able to monitor not only simple inventory on hand, but would have the ability to simultaneously view, track, and report pending shipments, pending receipts, open invoices, and many other key point indicators necessary to keep their business running smoothly and efficiently. Whatever the KPI, Forefront Fashion would be able to export that data from the QLS Weblink Portal and parse that information to forecast upcoming shipping needs, seasonal trends, overall supply chain productivity, and more.
With the extra inbound shipping fees and detention issues now addressed, the team at Quality Logistics Systems turned to ironing out Forefront Fashion’s excessive drayage costs. Since the centralized warehousing system and Weblink Portal provided the capability to see all inventory on hand, Quality Logistics Systems’ team was able to build out a custom ordering system to request the products needed by the Forefront Fashion fulfillment center multiple times a week. This system allowed Forefront Fashion to place larger “to be fulfilled” item orders and reduce the amount of drayage per piece of merchandise needed to be processed. As a result, Forefront Fashion is now able to satisfy their inventory fulfillment needs with only one or two local shipments per week on average, and can have their orders pulled, packed, palletized, reported back, and shipped with less than one week’s lead time from when the order is placed.
Since executing the plan developed by Quality Logistics Systems, the Forefront Fashion management and staff have greatly reduced the amount of shipping, warehousing, and delivery complications that they were experiencing prior to approaching the QLS team. According to the Forefront Fashion management, having inventory held in a local and centralized warehouse combined with all the benefits of the WMS/Weblink Portal has been both a stress and cost relief, and they have been very pleased with the service and expertise provided by Quality Logistics Systems. To date, Forefront Fashion has reported savings exceeding 2 million dollars since implementing the Quality Logistics Systems plan, drastically reducing drayage costs, storage fees, and detention charges, while also improving labor efficiency, order fill rates, and, most importantly, customer satisfaction.
* Cookies and More is a fictitious name for an actual client. Out of respect for client confidentiality, QLS does not disclose current or prior clients.
