Fashion Days

CROSSPOINT IMPLEMENTATION – CASE STUDY

About the Company

The Fashion Days story began in 2009, with the mission of giving access to exclusive brands designed to contribute to a positive change in look and style. In the years to come, the company has evolved and has become a complete product: an online shop with an impressive variety of products and brands, accessible anywhere and anytime.
Now it is the fashionable destination of Romania, Bulgaria and Hungary. It offers hundreds of thousands of products from an impressive variety of brands.


ELA Award

In the 2015 edition of the European Gold Medal in Logistics & Supply Chain, the Project of the Year category, Fashion Days took third place with the “Logistics and Operations with Style“, the competition being represented by projects from all European countries, members of ELA.


Some of the project challenges

  • The high number of commands during the go-live;
  • High number of transactions per second;
  • Concurrent implementation of WMS and conveyor solutions;
  • Constant business changes (volumes, number of deposits, peak periods);
  • Integration of over 200 new users into the system;
  • Variety of rules brought by concurrent delivery to 10 different countries
  • Very short migration time
  • IT teams geographically separated at infrastructure level, monitoring, business flows;
  • Initial expansion from 1 to 3 warehouses, then consolidation of operations through a migration that had to allow concurrently existing flows set and those adapted to the new logistics center;
  • High volume transactions interfaced with external systems
  • Implement billing and printable policies at WMS solution level
  • Various types of merchandise with distinct logistic behavior

Solution

Go-live in the Fashion Days warehouse was held on May 11, 2013, four months after the start of the project.

Subsequent expansion ranged from the implementation of 2 more warehouses to migration to a new logistics center.

The positive results were immediate. Stock Accuracy exceeded 99.998%, and volume duplications could be made without significant changes in the chart of the chart.

Crosspoint transformation into the central IT system used in logistics was allowed by interfaces between IT systems that allowed more than 100,000 daily transactions exchanged between systems.

From a functional point of view, including streams such as RMA and cycle count allowed both performance increase and greater transparency to other departments.

The decision to serialize the exceptions identified at the reception and to include in the system the traceability of the refused returns made Crosspoint to monitor the real situation on the ground beyond the bookkeeping stocks maintained at the level of financial accounting solutions.


Crosspoint WMS

Testimonial Paul COPIL
Chief Operations Officer,
Fashion Days:

  • WMS deployment motivation
  • post-implementation results
  • direct and indirect benefits
  • return on investment
  • relationship with the implementation team
  • Feedback on using Crosspoint

Initially implemented features:

l

Reception

The reception module was implemented in accordance with the physical processes performed in the warehouse. The solution to tag the downloaded palette allowed tracking of the goods in progress. Products with atypical volume were separated from standard ones. Activating Crosspoint Back Office as a receiving tool has enabled the identification of products with no online content as well as discrepancies between Crosspoint embedded images with e-commerce solution and merchandise received from the vendor. Individual item tagging allowed independent suppliers to accurate accuracy in using single or valid barcodes. Linking to purchase orders and attaching serial numbers and exception pictures allowed a high transparency of the interaction between the Logistics, Finance and Purchasing departments.

Put Away

The put-away process allowed a double check of the correctness of the reception process as well as a separation of the destinations of the goods in the warehouse. For its flash receivers, the direction to the conveyor area was immediate. For special-purpose merchandise (exceptions, consignment, custody), the system was set to route scanned carriages to the appropriate areas in the warehouse. Maintaining the concept of stock and flash-sales campaigns has been integrated without affecting the fluency and similarity of the process for end-users. In order to streamline the warehouse’s workload in the case of flash receivers, the process coincided with integration with the automation solution, with the order-based ordering and order-level prioritization of open orders in the system. The chaos storage system has proven to be best suited for balancing storage and picking.

Conveyor Integration

For maximum process-level accuracy, the decision was to set WMS as the master in relation to the conveyor solution implemented. The diverting allocations made by the system have been parameterized to differentiate between single-line and multi-line commands, in balancing the command consolidation areas and resource loading.

Courier integration

Crosspoint WMS has integrated from the first day of go-live, AWB number allocation from pre-administered series by system administrators, AWB printing with specific rules set for 10 countries shipped from central warehouse, delivery of parcels delivered to courier systems of the 10 destination countries.

Billing

In order to manage partial deliveries quickly, the billing process has been integrated into the WMS solution. The distribution of discounts, the allocation of transport costs, the management of their own commodity or consignment priorities, the take-over of the ERP solution bills were some of the rules allowed by the Crosspoint functionalities adapted to the requirements of Fashion Days. Along with the courier integration solution, the process was transparent to end-users integrated into the packing process.

Consolidation & Transport

In order to make collaboration with courier partners more efficient, parcels prepared have been grouped through the Crosspoint WMS solution in bigboxes with assigned unique series, restricted to a common destination (country / area). The consolidation process allowed for weight-to-weight consolidation as well as increased accuracy by using the Crosspoint Transport module that certified the exact time each package was uploaded to the courier machine. Integration with the e-commerce solution allowed automatic notification of end-user notifications about this event.

Wave picking

The balancing of picking and packing for stock-type campaigns was made possible by the wave picking module that allowed for the cumulative preparation of multiple consecutive priority orders, a common country-specific destination that holds real-time single-line , multi-line) and multi-line storage capacity. The definition of special areas for high value products was possible through the rights assigned to users in the system. Optimization of the picking route has been set according to the size of the active picking team and the minimum route in the warehouse.

Further implemented features:

Periodic inventory

To eliminate as much of the time as the annual inventory, continuous inventory has been activated through the Crosspoint Cycle Count functionality, ensuring a balance of activity during a fashion inventory set by Fashion Days at 6 months. With proven accuracy and system reporting, this process was an externally auditable one.

RMA (Return merchandise authorization)

The high volume of returns specific to the online retail industry has led to a new project-targeted improvement by implementing Crosspoint RMA in the local offices of Fashion Days and the central warehouse, which has led to complete traceability of return incidents, integration with the internal ticketing system used by the Customer Care department. Reasons for returns and product images were centralized using Crosspoint WMS. It was the major step by which the only information system used in the warehouse became the WMS solution, communication with other departments and systems being fully automated.

Stock in consignment

Consignment stock inclusion was a business requirement that standard system capabilities could respond quickly to integrate this stock into the central repository without changing the way it works or without allocating physically dedicated areas.

Weighing parcels

In order to better integrate with the courier system weighing parcels was implemented at the moment of their consolidation in boxes, depending on the routes received from the courier.

Manual batch picking

In order to make picking more efficient for large orders, the possibility of generating manual batch was implemented. For these batchs, you can choose exactly what commands are wanted, unlike normal batchs that accumulate command chips by an automated algorithm.

Conveyor separation of single line flow

The flow of commands containing a single item has been separated from the conveyor. This way the conveyor was used to consolidate items from multiple-order commands. A separate single-line billing post was created to free the conveyor from items that went directly to the packaging.

Separate samples at the receiving

Similar to non-conformance separation, sampling was also implemented. When an ERP flag is received regarding the need for samples, this is reported to the operator at the reception. The desired samples are thus moved to specific boxes and sent to the departments where they were needed.

Bulk stocks delivery

In the case where a customer has an understanding through which he can buy all the remaining stock of certain items, a flow through which pickers moves these products into special cells from which the output of the goods is generated has been implemented.

Dashboard

Deployment tracking has been deployed to help allocate resources.

Transfer to external deposits

The multi-deposited capacity of the WMS system was necessary both to coordinate the work of several warehouses in WMS and of the initial stock under custody of service operators.

BI integration (Business Intelligence)

Strengthening information in terms of performance and stock evolution on the ground were possible by integrating with its own BI solution. Stockflow transactions between locations in Crosspoint were the basis for complete tracking of stock transformations.

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POST-IMPLEMENTATION RESULTS

Automation

A new fully automated conveyor has been installed and synchronized with Crosspoint WMS. By using an internal bar code system and redundant scanning, the speed was improved by 700% while the FTE was reduced by 65% and the error rate dropped to a subunit.

1.500

commands/hour

Intelligent storage

By implementing the used chaotic storage system, reception and picking times were improved by 400%.
A square meter of shelf can contain up to 500 products and the entire stock is now available in real time.

 

1.2 MIL

stock items

Control

Each stage of the process is fully monitored and controlled.
Several systems ensure the transparency and monitoring of processes, financial operations and customer feedback.
BI Platform stores all data for reporting.

10,000

transactions/hour

Transform

The operational process has been completely redesigned and adapted to the shift from flash sales to retail.
Implementing Crosspoint WMS ensures inventory control and complete traceability from delivery to customer returns.

 

0.01%

processing errors

Crosspoint

High Reliability Solution with Low Operating Costs

Prior to implementing the automation, 210 people in three shifts worked with the Distribution Center, with 70 people per shift, reaching a maximum of 200 orders/hour with a 30 minute average processing time per order.
Currently, there are only two shifts, with 35 people per shift, and the processing capacity has increased to 1,500 orders per hour, with an average processing time of less than 5 minutes per order. In addition, even if the processing speed has increased enormously, errors have fallen from 7% to less than 0.01%.
In the case of salespeaks, the system proves its flexibility, allowing an increase in processing capacity by installing additional packaging stations or expanding to the third stage.
The WMS can easily be upgraded and expanded due to the modular construction. Moreover, extra staff do not require special training – everything can be learned in up to 4 hours.
The system also provides full traceability of the product, indicating what the operator did, the quality check, packing or shipping, who the driver was, what the package was transported, etc.

Point Logistix has very well understood our business specifics and internal procedures, which has significantly reduced implementation time. After optimizing internal logistics, we decided to extend the initial application by developing additional modules. We recommend this team for professionalism and ability to overcome deadlines, even when they are very tight.
Paul Copil

Chief Operations Officer, Fashion Days

Case studies