The company is a premier sock and legwear design and marketing company headquartered in the United States. The brand has a reputation for premium quality products, unique designs and innovative use of natural and synthetic fibers. Their products can be found online, in department stores, mass retail chains and at specialty retailers.

Before reaching out to Fortude, the US-based sock and legwear company was operating in silos, with each department having a home-grown system or a proprietary system, which lead to each department manually coordinating from the point of a customer order being raised. The brand’s reliance on its legacy ERP system and lack of streamlined processes prevented it from getting the most out of its technology investments. Fortude replaced the legacy ERP system with the integrated Infor CloudSuite Fashion solution, helping the organization create efficiencies, from design to distribution.

Challenges

• Dependency on legacy systems and its inherent issues.
• Lack of streamlined processes.
• Excessive manual work to maintain item, customer, supplier, price lists and other data sets.
• Manual workloads across sales, procurement and finance functions.
• Existing distribution and fulfillment workflows required extensive resources and repetitive work.
• Inability to make decisions due to unavailability of real-time/accurate data.

Solutions

• The core solution is based on Infor CloudSuite Fashion and Infor Factory Track, enhanced by Fortude’s custom-built extensions to provide vendor management functionality, factoring integrations, as well as goods receiving.
• A comprehensive solution that streamlined processes across sales, vendor management, warehouse operations and finance.

Impact

• An integrated system which centralizes all operations, across the sales, purchasing, distribution and finance streams.
• Complete visibility of customer activities via integration to all inbound order sources (EDI and others).
• Total control of supplier activities via a fully-fledged vendor management solution – Fortude Vendor Portal.
• Well-defined and standardized end-to-end processes for all operations.
• Availability of real-time data to facilitate informed decision making.
• Reduced effort & time taken to process sales orders with real time integration to order source systems and implementation of system-based order validations.
• Elimination of email / courier-based communications with vendors/suppliers for purchase order processing, shipping documents & regulatory documents.
• Single source of truth, and elimination of three departmental systems, multiple data feeds and 2 full time resources who manually maintained multiple systems.
• An improvement in warehouse output, through the integrated solution which helped streamline processes across goods receiving, inspection, put away, picking, packing and dispatch.
• Improvement in finance month-end closing efforts and data generation for factoring systems, via the new integrated solution, which offers a single source of truth.
• Optimization of Infor Factory Track to reduce scanning speed and bring down the time spent scanning a container of shipments from 84 minutes to 3 minutes.