THE WINE ENTHUSIAST COMPANY LEVERAGES VENDORNET DROPSHIP MANAGER FOR STRATEGIC AND TACTICAL ADVANTAGE

VendorNet Payoff

• Eliminates potential time delays of up to 5 days per order
• Automates clerical processes increasing business efficiencies
• Immediate access to order status for increased customer satisfaction
• Cost of investment recognized within 6 months
• Intelligent business decisions via real-time supplier visibility
• Reduces inventory carrying costs by expanding drop ship opportunities

"VendorNet is both a tactical and strategic solution for us. Tactically, it delivers more accurate and timely information, and reduces lead-time and paperwork on a day-to-day basis. Strategically, it helps us map the performance of our drop ship partners, enabling us to make better business decisions."

Hank Rosen, Chief Operating Officer
The Wine Enthusiast Company

The Company

For over 20 years, The Wine Enthusiast Company has been an innovator in delivering wine-related products to a diverse customer base ranging from novice enthusiasts to serious collectors. To satisfy the unique needs of its customers, The Wine Enthusiast Company draws from a rich source of suppliers for its diverse product offerings as well as custom designed products. With an impressive total of over 300 million published catalogs since its inception, The Wine Enthusiast Company also embraces a thriving e-commerce sales channel to bring its superior knowledge, products, and services to wine enthusiasts worldwide.

The Business Challenge
Business Partner Performance Visibility

Over 30 percent of The Wine Enthusiast Company's business is outsourced for direct shipment from its suppliers. This includes items that are best shipped direct from the supplier for inventory and delivery efficiencies, as well as customized items such as wine cellars to meet the exact specifications of a customer. In many cases, orders for these customized products can range in sales dollars of $2,000 to $20,000 per order, making streamlined processing of each transaction that much more important. Acutely aware of the strategic and tactical impact its drop ship partners has on the successful operation of its business, The Wine Enthusiast Company recognized the need to implement an automated environment that clearly and accurately identified and tracked business interaction with its extended fulfillment network.

Hank Rosen, Chief Operating Officer at The Wine Enthusiast Company elaborates, "We are dedicated to excellence both in the products and services we offer, as well as customer satisfaction. The performance of our drop ship business partners is in reality our performance; the buck still stops with us from a customer perspective. This means that we have to be completely cognizant of the tactical and strategic impact each of our business partners has on a day-to-day, or even order-to-order basis, and on our bottom line. In the past, this visibility was limited by time and accuracy largely due to manual processes. By implementing VendorNet, we've made that visibility real-time so we always have our fingers on the pulse of our fulfillment network and the delivery of the finished products to our end customer."

The VendorNet Solution
Business and Supplier Integration

VendorNet Dropship Manager provided the tool to achieve this strategic and tactical advantage by establishing a web-based technology platform and supplier order management system that completely integrates The Wine Enthusiast Company with its inventory partners. As a result, all parties on each end have critical information at their fingertips to ensure best business practices and the ultimate satisfaction of the most important part of the business equation - the customer.

VendorNet created the visibility needed to accurately track the progression of an order and ultimately the performance of the supplier. From the time an order is placed, through shipment and invoicing, The Wine Enthusiast Company has a real-time view of its status. No longer is there a 5-day delay between sending an order to a supplier and receiving confirmation it was received, or worst case never receiving a confirmation and having to start the entire order placement process over. Orders are transmitted via the Internet; shipment updates and invoices are issued; invoices are issued and automatically linked to an order; and customer service has instantaneous visibility to order status throughout the complete cycle.

Donna Jansson, Director of Inventory Control & Planning comments, "Without VendorNet every order required manual intervention. Orders were faxed to a supplier and then we waited sometimes 5 days for a reply confirming receipt, and all too often, the supplier would say they never received the order so the entire process restarted from scratch. VendorNet has allowed us to electronically integrate our order and invoicing processes with our vendors. It's an invaluable tool for monitoring and managing an extremely critical part of our business."

Reaping The Benefits

As a tactical tool, VendorNet delivers automated, timely, and accurate information pertaining to each individual order and supplier providing The Wine Enthusiast Company with an early warning system in the event of a problem and enabling proactive resolution. Strategically, VendorNet's reporting function relays supplier performance information such as volume of sales, order fill rates, and other supplier performance metrics. With this information, The Wine Enthusiast Company can intelligently plan for future peak seasons, modify offerings to enhance sales, or develop specialized merchandising programs tailored to a supplier - in other words, work with the supplier to mutually increase bottom line revenue.

Rosen explains, "There are the obvious benefits that VendorNet delivers by eliminating many manual tasks. But what I really like about VendorNet is that we have complete visibility to the progression of the manufacturing of our specialty dropship products. That's just fabulous in terms of understanding lead times and communicating realistic information to our customers. It also allows us to plan accordingly for peak seasons such as when to stop accepting orders on certain items in order to meet a holiday delivery date for instance. That kind of information can be very important in terms of forecasting, not to mention customer retention."

Jansson concurs and adds a few facts, "VendorNet will have paid for itself in 6 months just in the savings we have realized in fax bills. My employees have been freed up from the manual drudgery to perform other business functions with greater responsibility. With our order volume extremely high during peak season, we might have 2,000 orders out with a single supplier; the time savings we are realizing with the electronic visibility on our orders with VendorNet is just tremendous."

Because of the positive impact to revenue and cost savings VendorNet Dropship Manager has delivered, The Wine Enthusiast Company will be implementing VendorNet Stock PO Manager to automate processes in its in-house inventory purchasing operations.

Madge Kellick, Manager, Inventory Planning states, "From an inventory standpoint, we are plagued with many of the same manual inefficiencies previously found in the drop ship ordering and invoicing processes. VendorNet Stock PO Manager will eliminate these problems, essentially giving me electronic clerks to handle functions such as order transmission to our suppliers, online order acknowledgements, tracking and approval processing of purchase order revisions, tracking of inventory delivery and receipt, and automated invoice matching with no additional headcount required."

At the End of the Day

Rosen sums it up, "Anything that is simple to use, positively impacts bottom line, saves time and increases productivity is a great product and business asset, and VendorNet is exactly that.