The Clothingsites group was formed in 2002 as an online retailer of high-end clothing brands via its flagship e-commerce websites Woodhouse Clothing and Brown Bag. Woodhouse Clothing brings the latest menswear styles from leading premium brands including Armani, Boss, Lacoste, CP Company, and its own label, The Dapper Stag. Brown Bag brings the very best designer menswear at discount prices, with over 50 brands including Armani, Boss, Stone Island, Lacoste, and Fred Perry.
After taking investment, Clothingsites had ambitious plans for growth, so a key requirement of all new systems was the ability to scale. Simple integration was important as they were also investing in a new e-commerce platform and had selected Magento. Additionally, Clothingsites needed the ability to easily integrate with several bespoke back office systems developed in-house. They were looking for a system that was user friendly and made data readily available for management reporting and a system that was well-supported, both during installation and on-boarding, but also during day-to-day operations once live.
Prior to Peoplevox, Clothingsites were using a legacy e-commerce platform with an extremely convoluted order processing routine. Picking was paper based, inefficient, and prone to errors. Packing and despatch was problematic, and an additional checking stage was needed to minimise errors, slowing the process down considerably. On top of this, a manual match up of packing note and courier label was also required, which caused bottlenecks at times of high volume. Products were stored using an alphanumeric coding system meaning there was an inefficient use of storage space and warehousing of new goods was troublesome. Inventory was often inaccurate, which wasn’t helped by many disjointed back office processes that could affect stock levels and required human intervention. Stock takes were difficult to complete on this legacy system, if not impossible, and the goods in process was time consuming, and prone to error.
By using Peoplevox’s off-the-shelf integration to Magento, orders were able to flow directly without any manual process at all. The use of handheld scanners meant that picking was more streamlined with operatives being directed around the warehouse in the most efficient sequence. Despatching goods was made much easier with the packing note and courier label automatically printing in real-time at the pack bench. The location-based warehousing system allowed Clothingsites to store products in any location, making much better use of the space and vastly simplifying the put away process.
With full inventory visibility, stock was more accurate, and there is now a considerably reduced scope for manual adjustments to introduce errors. Stock takes, both rolling or full, are easier to undertake with the handheld scanners, and the goods in process is much quicker. Entire deliveries can be received into the warehouse in a fraction of the time it previously took, and new stock is live on the website in real time.
"What first drew me to Peoplevox was that it had been built from the ground up to handle the unique challenges of e-commerce order fulfilment.
Since deploying Peoplevox, it has been a key component in our evolution and it is fair to say that we would not have been able to fulfil the volume of orders on our most recent peak trading days without Peoplevox.
The system has helped automate our warehouse operations in many ways and provided us with a host of benefits including more efficient and effective warehouse resourcing, improved stock visibility and traceability, more accurate inventory counts, fewer picking errors, better reporting, improved customer service, and a vast reduction in paperwork!"
- Paul Bradley, The Clothingsites Group
120 Randall Drive
Waterloo, Ontario
N2V 1C6
Canada
info@descartes.com
