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One of the toughest barriers to growth that many companies struggle with is keeping up with demand. This is especially true in seasonally based businesses, where unexpected surges in ordering can turn into a fulfillment nightmare. Here’s how we helped our client, a seller of Christmas trees, eliminate costly inefficiencies in their shipping processes while enabling quicker turnaround on customer payments.
Puleo International, known as “The Oldest Family Name for Christmas Trees in America,” is a global manufacturer and distributor of Christmas trees and holiday decor items. Looking to streamline their logistics processes, they needed us to build a solution that could receive order details from marketplaces (e.g. Wayfair, Amazon, Target) via API/EDI connection in NetSuite and ensure those orders were fulfilled from the appropriate warehouse in Puleo’s network.
However, after we set up their automated fulfillment solution, the operations and finance teams found it hard catching up to the pace of fulfillment because of the seasonal nature of their industry (Puleo does about 95% of their business in a 2-month stretch). As a result, they were having trouble:
To help remove manual bottlenecks in their fulfillment process, we added two modifications to our original solution:
Once we automated these key steps in Puleo’s fulfillment process, their team was able to cut turnaround times on order shipments to a fraction of what they’d been before, including during peak season when order volume reaches above 1,000 per day. Now that they no longer had to manually pick the fulfillment location for each order or send out invoices, their on-time delivery rate jumped 28% while their average collection period dropped by 42%, resulting in higher customer satisfaction and improved monthly cash flow.
