Challenge

Apparel brand Shinesty’s rapid growth prompted the company to rethink the internal workflows that power its massive distribution center. Shinesty had previously invested in a popular shipping platform. But despite the bells and whistles out of the box, it didn’t seamlessly scale and proved to be an unstable solution for keeping pace with demand.

The company attempted to outwork recurring deficiencies in its pick-and-ship process, which forced the warehouse team to generate shipments on one platform, take notes on another, and then circle back to input data into NetSuite manually.

What Shinesty needed was a way to streamline shipping and improve integration with remote scanners to help warehouse pickers find and inventory stock.

How We Helped

The CrossCountry Consulting NetSuite team was engaged to create a custom shipping solution that could help boost picking efficiency and facilitate faster shipments at larger quantities. The team got to work with an on-site walkthrough and a series of fact-finding sessions, which uncovered the core processes and warehouse dynamics most in need of improvement.

The project included a variety of key optimizations to enhance the cross-flow of administrative data and tasks in the pursuit of a transformed staff and customer experience, including:

  • Designing and building a unique NetSuite instance from scratch.
  • Translating unique IT and business requirements into an operational roadmap.
  • Functionality to facilitate the company reaching and sustaining peak efficiency across its distribution center.
  • Simplifying and consolidating the interface for creating, recording, and handling shipments, including the use of a new shipping app.
  • Feeding data back into NetSuite and eliminating manual input during the order process.

Results

Shinesty’s custom solution offered numerous critical advantages to operational and procurement teams such as:

  • Speeding up shipments and preventing bottlenecks during heavier shipping periods.
  • Enabling integration with unconventional carriers and handling the complexities of custom orders, including multiple items/category orders to single items, subscription items, or order types outside the NetSuite system altogether.

Roughly six months after the initial implementation, Shinesty installed a packing machine and requested additional integration between the machine and the shipping solution. The CrossCountry Consulting team wrote new code that used prompts from the machine to initiate workflows within the shipping solution, thus enabling automation and saving time.

Now, with their custom-designed solution and improved WMS capabilities, Shinesty has real-time inventory updates — and no lag time. In less than two years, the company experienced an over 50% increase in efficiency across its distribution center.

*SCS Cloud is part of CrossCountry Consulting.