Growing with the Customer, OutBound Shipping Systems Provides Almost 15 years of Efficient & Sophisticated Automated Shipping for Catalog Vendor
The Challenge
When a national $200 million company that depends on catalog sales and e-commerce has trouble with its shipping solution, there’s a problem.
To ship its products, this company considered a number of integrated automated shipping solutions, but most would have trouble keeping up with the company’s rapid growth. However, an automated shipping system from OutBound Shipping Systems is able to grow with the customer.
The Solution
In 1991, OutBound was chosen to provide an automated shipping system because it was able to integrate its shipping system into the customer’s ERP and its warehouse system.
The first installation was a single workstation in a 100,000 square-foot warehouse; soon this expanded into multiple work stations in order to utilize scanning equipment to eliminate keystroke entry and permit data scanning.
Six months later, the customer moved into a 600,000 square-foot warehouse in rural Missouri, and OutBound made the move with them. Very soon, traditional packing and shipping stations were replaced with unattended shipping equipment, including conveyers, in-line scales, and scanning equipment. Weighing and scanning are now handled in seconds, determining tracking and order numbers.
In addition to being able to rate shop on true rates, this OutBound system gives the customer the ability to rate shop based on user-determined exceptions, such as service level discounts and customer service integration.
Today, packing stations and packers have been eliminated, helping this customer save on employee salaries and insurance, as well as workman’s compensation and other employee-related costs.
The Bottom Line
In taking the customer from a single work station at a single location to “invisible” or unattended virtual shipping, OutBound has helped them realize average savings of $162,000 annually after an initial investment of $30,000 in 1991. And after almost a decade and a half, the OutBound system is still going strong; still growing to meet the customer’s needs.