Wigwam Mills Knits a Seamless Shipping Experience
with Varsity |
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Wigwam Mills makes socks—thousands of them every day. They come in
a wide variety of colors, sizes, and styles, represented by nearly 2,000
stock keeping units. Wigwam Mills ships 350-500 parcels a day from their
highly automated 90,000 square foot distribution center in Sheboygan, Wisconsin.
UPS is the primary carrier, transporting orders to major retailers including
Dick's Sporting Goods, REI and Sports Authority as well as several divisions
of the military.
In 1998, Wigwam Mills undertook an initiative to ensure that all their IBM
iSeries applications were Y2K compliant. This initiative gave Wigwam Mills
a chance to replace multiple outdated PC-based transportation and warehouse
management systems. The company had one PC system for picking and packing,
another for logistics and warehouse location and a third for order entry
and inventory management.
Maintaining multiple PC-based software systems had several disadvantages.
Although the initial investment in their PC systems was low, maintenance
costs were excessive. Expensive software consultants were required each
time a change was needed. To complicate matters, these systems from multiple
vendors didn't "speak" to each other. Keeping systems in synch
was labor intensive and impacted warehouse productivity. The shipping department
needed to shut down an hour early each day to allow time for close-out.
While their PC systems may have been outdated, Wigwam Mill's use of customized
radio frequency (RF) technology to pick and pack goods was highly sophisticated.
Any new shipping system had to support the company's unique RF processes
while adding off-the-shelf pick, pack and ship functionality. "Getting
the source code was very important to us," comments Bill Young, Programmer
Analyst for Wigwam Mills. "We needed the reliability of a commercial
product with the flexibility of a customized solution."
Wigwam Mills found the flexibility, reliability and performance they required
in a new shipping system from Varsity Logistics. To replace their obsolete
ERP systems, Wigwam turned to Geac. Designed to support apparel manufacturers,
Geac Style21 was a natural fit with the company's style, color and size
requirements.
Wigwam completed implementation of their new Geac Style21 ERP system in
October 1999. That left the information technology team with less than 30
days to build a custom interface between Varsity ShipSoft and Geac Style21
and to customize Varsity ShipPack to fit their RF processes. While most
Varsity users rely on ShipSoft's off-the-shelf functionality and standard
interfaces, Wigwam customized the software code to meet their unique requirements.
"The design of ShipPack allowed us to easily adapt it," notes
Young. "We modified ShipPack to work with fewer data entry fields and
shrunk the screens to fit a handheld RF scanner."
According to Young, building the interface to Geac Style21 was even easier.
"ShipSoft is designed to interface with complementary applications
and includes almost all the data elements a programmer needs. We built our
integration in two days."
On November 1, 1999, Wigwam went live with their completely new, fully integrated,
ERP and shipping system. Today, ShipSoft and ShipPack are a seamless component
of the company's shipping, inventory and order processes.
Goods are selected from a paper pick slip that is bar coded with the order
number. Picked items are scanned and RF is used to instantly report the
inventory adjustment triggering automated replenishment. At the packing
station, RF is used to identify which order is being packed through an ID
scan and to notify ShipPack when a container is full. ShipPack prints a
packing slip with a UCC128 number identifying the container. When the container
is closed, ShipSoft is notified to weigh, rate, and generate a carrier-compliant
shipping label. Once processing is complete, shipment details such as the
tracking number and freight costs are passed back through the interface
to Geac Style21 making shipment history and status information available
from any computer terminal with iSeries access.
Wigwam's investment in iSeries-based systems continues to payoff in reduced
costs and increased productivity. Seamless integration between their iSeries-based
ERP and shipping systems has increased productivity. Time-consuming upload
and download processes were eliminated. Now, instead of shutting down their
shipping operations one hour before the end-of-the-day, Wigwam completes
daily shipping close-out in less than ten minutes. In addition, although
shipping volume continues to grow, Wigwam has not increased their shipping
staff since implementation in 1999.
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