Downloads

RSS

Alliance Entertainment Corporation is a leading provider of home entertainment products (CDs, DVDs, videos, video games, and related merchandise). Their business model comprises both direct-to-retail store distribution and Consumer Direct Fulfillment (CDF), providing services to over 30,000 storefronts and shipping over five million individual customer orders per year.

In its CDF segment, Alliance Entertainment must run a very lean operation in order to realize adequate margins. The previous approach to order fulfillment—manual processing using barcodes—was labor intensive, inefficient, and prone to human error. Here's how it operated: Alliance Entertainment picked and packed the CDF orders in a sequential fashion using a barcode shipment identifier. After the initial product batch pick, workers would manually evaluate each order, sort the product, pack it, attach a removable barcode plate for identification, and convey the packages to a secondary location for weighing and the printing of shipping labels. Boxes were weighed and labeled according to the barcode plate, so if at any point along this sequential process a worker error managed to disrupt the sequence (and thus, the association of package to barcode plate), many shipments could be affected. As Alliance Entertainment ships orders directly to consumers under the identity of the retailer who took the order, incorrect shipments resulted in bad business relations with the retailers who compete with each other for consumer business, to say nothing of customers who received the wrong product. Customer returns and subsequent reshipments also added directly to the cost of doing business. Running six days a week, the CDF operation processes an average of 15,000 packages a day; even a small percentage of errors could produce a significant impact on the bottom line.