Customer Success Story

Wild Planet Toys, Inc.

At a Glance
Company	Wild Planet Toys
Industry	Innovative toy manufacturer
Headquarters	San Francisco, CA
Employees	50
Logistics	Receives up to 300 orders per day
Business Challenge	Inefficient manual ship-fill process was error-prone, created inefficiencies and wasted resources
Solution	Epicor for Distribution
Business Benefits	Increased the accuracy and reduced the cycle time of the ship-fill process Improved cash flow through next day invoicing Reduction in the time required to perform selection and matching of stock to orders Improved management decision-making process by greatly increasing the volume, accuracy and timeliness of the available information
Return on Investment	Saving 1-3 man-hours per day in ship-fill process Reduced the elapsed time of receipt of order to distribution from over a day to 1-2 hours

Wild Planet Toys has saved 40 hours per month in ship fill by switching to new software that automates much of the process. In the past, order selection and matching were tedious manual processes that involved printing paper reports, selecting orders against inventory stock lists, and transmitting the information to a third party logistics (3PL) provider.

The company made the decision to switch to a new accounting system that offers powerful integrated distribution capabilities, including the ability to filter orders according to criteria selected by users and then, after human checking, automatically enter them into the distribution system. “The reduction in the time required to perform selection and matching with Epicor for Distribution has provided dramatic time and cost savings, making it possible to accommodate our rapid growth with only a minimal staffing increase,” said Steve Revere, Vice President of Information Technology for the San Francisco-based toy company. “We have also reduced the elapsed time from receipt of order to transmission to distribution from over a day to an hour or two.”

Wild Planet Toys was founded in 1993 with the mission to create quality products that spark the imagination and provide positive experiences without relying on violence. At the heart of Wild Planet’s success is the important role kids play in the product development process. Through interactive Toy Opinion Parties and Panels, Wild Planet passes every step of the creation process in front of kids.

Ship Fill Was Bottleneck in Past
During its busy season, which runs from August through January, the company typically receives 300 orders a day from large retailers such as Walmart, Toys’R’Us, Target and Kohl and a wide range of smaller stores. “The ship fill process used to be a major bottleneck,” Revere said. Orders come into Wild Planet in a number of ways, primarily through electronic data interchange (EDI) from larger customers and by fax from smaller customers.

In the past, orders were entered and then a report was printed of all outstanding orders, including those that had been held over from previous days because stock wasn’t available. Another report was then printed containing a listing of the inventory available at Orion Logistics, our 3PL. Then a group of clerks would pour over the two reports and select orders for shipment and enter them into the distribution module. Errors frequently arose during this manual process, especially when two clerks accidentally each prepared the same order for shipment. The next day, when the shipment report came back from the 3PL, another multi-person task, matching orders against shipments, had to be performed. This matching process was critical it was the only point at which errors created during order selection could be detected.

Wild Planet’s previous accounting system offered an interface to EDI software that was used to accept orders from larger customers but the EDI invoicing function itself was so cumbersome that Wild Planet had to send invoices in the mail, delaying payment by at least a week. The company made the decision to replace the previous software and Revere began looking for software that was equally strong in both accounting and distribution functionality. “I looked at all the major midmarket brands, and Epicor was the only one that met our needs in both areas,” he said. “Epicor for Distribution offers capabilities far beyond what I saw in other packages such as the ability to automate the entire order entry process, including orders, shipping and returns. Epicor also offered the services of their consulting team to meet several company specific requirements that no packages were able to handle off the shelf.”

Customization Aids Streamlining Effort
The Epicor consulting team made an important modification to the ship fill feature that adds a range dialog window to the calculate function. Now, when users start the ship fill process and select the calculate button, they are prompted with a pop-up dialog form that lets them filter and sort orders by several criteria including order number range, customer code, price class, item code and territory.

In accounts receivable, the sales rep manager field was used to group customers for the purpose of sales forecasting, rep management and reporting. A custom formula was created to track the sales representative and corresponding representative group at the order level for commissions calculations and was also put to use in reporting sales by grouping customers according to several criteria based on price class, territory code and affiliated customer code. Wild Planet took advantage of the capabilities of Epicor’s EDI partner eBridge to implement both sales order and invoicing capabilities at the same time the software went live.

“The new software has streamlined every aspect of the ship fill process,” Revere said. “Now, we begin the process by sorting orders according to any criteria that we desire. The software then matches the orders to available inventory in according to the criteria we have selected. For example, the software automatically avoids selecting orders for customers that do not meet our credit requirements. Human errors, such as selecting the same order twice or entering an incorrect purchase order, have been virtually eliminated."

Revere continued, "The job of the clerk has been elevated to the role of setting priorities and handling special situations. Once they are satisfied with the selection, they simply push a button and the software generates a file that we can send to the 3PL. When the 3PL sends us a file back of the actual shipments, we import it into Epicor for Distribution and it automatically matches up the shipments against the outstanding orders. Automating what used to be two very tedious manual tasks has saved us approximately one to three man-hours per day, making it possible to handle a very large increase in volume with only a small increase in staff.”

Increasing Accuracy and Reducing Cycle Time
Revere said that the new software has also increased the accuracy and reduced the cycle time of the ship fill process. “The errors that frequently happened with the previous manual process meant that we were never entirely sure what we had in stock,” he said. “The result was that we would send orders to the 3PL that couldn’t be filled and would end up with 40 partially filled orders sitting in the staging area and no idea when they would ship.

Epicor for Distribution provides a nearly error-free process that has helped to increase our fill rate by 40% to 85%. We are also in a much better position to tell our customers exactly when they can expect to receive merchandise. And the additional speed of the automated process has improved our cash flow. Instead of waiting two days for the order to be shipped and another week for the invoice to reach the customer, in most cases we now ship the order and deliver the invoice electronically to the customer by the next business day.”

The new software has also aided the management decision-making process by greatly increasing the volume, accuracy and timeliness of the available information. “We weren’t always able to get accurate information out of the old software,” Revere said. “For example, we would run a sales by rep report and then run a sales by customer report for that rep’s customers and get a different number and it was very difficult to understand why. Now, the reports are all coming out accurate using Crystal Decisions - Seagate Info Desktop 7.5, which easily integrates with Epicor for Distribution. Besides making it easy for business users to create and modify their own reports, this software package pro-vides online analytical processing that allows us to slice and dice our data in a number of ways that we couldn’t do in the past.”

Revere continued, “Right now, we are in the process of improving management information to the next level by implementing Epicor’s Active Planner enterprise budgeting and sales forecasting tool. Currently, we do our sales forecasting on spreadsheets that are separated from the actual financials. Soon, sales people will enter their forecasts into Active Planner over the Web and the information will be get rolled up through the corporate hierarchy and matched against actuals. These kinds of changes are improving the performance of our back office systems to the point that they have become a major strength of our organization.”