Casey's Furniture has been family owned entity since 1921 and is one of the largest furniture retailers in Munster, Ireland. Employing about 50 personnel to maintain store status and present customer service, this elegant furniture store also has its headquarters and a warehouse in Cork and an additional retail location in Limerick.
Walk into a Casey's Furniture store, and you'll find helpful sales people and a chic setting in which to choose furniture suites. Like most retail organizations, however, the back office is where things get rather complicated and sometimes cluttered.
Casey's previous order system was manual and extremely labor-intensive. The paper-based orders were piled up by fax machines, waiting to be routed for approval. This was not very convenient, considering the company has 70,000 buyers and delivers to approximately 8,000 of those buyers per year. Naturally, the deliveries demanded for fast transitions. Handwritten forms were faxed and entered into Casey's Unix-based Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system which then set off an approval process to ensure the order was keyed in properly. When completed, it was sent out to be approved by the sales staff, whose availability depended on their work schedule. It was only after all this is done, that the order was sent off to the manufacturer. The manufacturer gave Casey's a discount for raising held orders in a timely manner but this discount was often lost due to missing the required deadline. With approximately 50 orders a day, the paper-work, faxing, and approvals became error-prone and costly. With overhead expenses, missed deadlines, or mistakenly duplicating orders the errors can costs thousands. A minor mishandling in orders from the company equals a major delay in waiting time for the customer. Regardless of the best efforts, these little issues easily became big costly issues.
Along with Inpute Technologies, an Irish solutions provider, Casey's Furniture digitized and streamlined purchase orders with a complete system comprised of Open Text's Enterprise Content Management solutions and Microsoft NAV (NAVision) ERP application. Casey's relies on Open Text Fax Server, RightFax® Edition for electronic fax; Open Text Workflow Server, .NET Edition to route documents for approval; and Open Text Document Server, Alchemy Edition for digital archival. Orders are now automatically sent via e-mail for approval and simple clicks approve or disapprove various documents. On top of orders being inputted directly into the ERP system, desktop faxing is now done via Open Text Fax Server connector for Microsoft Exchange and Microsoft Outlook.
Casey's order system went from a laborious, error-prone annoyance to an integrated, paper-free proactive enterprise content solution. Fax machines, as well as stationary and printing costs were reduced by 60 percent. Delivery time was reduced by more than a week. Profits were increased by meeting manufacturing discount deadlines. Employees were able to be more productive, spending their time doing things other than orders. This change was not only a benefit for the suppliers, but also for the customers. References to documents are now being retrieved with ease; while answers to customer inquiries changed from two weeks to, as little as the same day. Aside from costs and time saving benefits, the company has improved customer service, which is number one on Casey Furniture's priority list.
For more information, please visit: Irish Retailer Automates Order Fulfillment with Integrated Solution from Open Text and Microsoft
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