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"SPS Commerce has provided Arena with an outsourced EDI solution that has exceeded my expectations. By outsourcing to SPS Commerce, Arena has been able to improve our productivity and enhance our supply chain relationships."
Keith Ritchie, Corporate IT Director, Arena Brands Inc.
Resources Case Studies
The Milwaukee-based Fashion Angels Enterprises was established in 1998 and quickly earned a reputation for designing and manufacturing tween girls’ products. Its personalized jewelry, fashion activity kits, and career kits total exceed 2,000 items and are carried by more than 3,000 retailers. In recent years, Fashion Angels has added many mass merchandiser retail customers, including Limited Too, Michaels, and PETCO, in addition to its traditional boutique customers.
Mass Merchandiser Requirements Necessitate Automation
Fashion Angels’ new clients brought growth – each week it receives more than 1,000 purchase orders -- as well as more complex routing, shipping and billing requirements that necessitated Electronic Data Interchange (EDI). Fashion Angels needed to advance its processes to effectively manage this volume of trading partners and their complex business requirements. Unfortunately, the company’s existing EDI system, that required manual entry by one full-time employee, was no longer sufficient or cost-effective.
Fashion Angels searched for an EDI provider that would integrate with their TRAVERSE accounting system from Open Systems, to receive purchase orders and generate invoices automatically. After surveying the market, Fashion Angels selected SPS Commerce’s integrated EDI service, SPSCommerce.net.
“SPS Commerce offered Fashion Angels the EDI service we needed to better manage our growing EDI volume, but just as importantly, they took the time to understand our business needs and offered additional capabilities including longer customer support hours than their competition,” stated Aaron Stenz, Purchasing and Logistics Manager, Fashion Angels. “Our choice was made when we saw SPS’ willingness and flexibility to partner with Open Systems to rapidly integrate the solutions.”
Rapid Integration with Accounting System
Within two months, SPSCommerce.net was integrated with TRAVERSE enabling Fashion Angels to send and receive their purchase orders and invoices in a fully automated fashion. Fashion Angels also upgraded to the latest version of TRAVERSE during this time as part of their plan.
Fashion Angels automates its purchase order, invoice, and UCC-128 label processes with SPS Commerce's outsourced services.
Without the need to manually enter EDI transactions, Fashion Angels is able to use its FTE resource to oversee its EDI flow and develop reports and analysis of customer buying patterns based on EDI data. This change has increased Fashion Angels’ knowledge of their supply chain and ordering trends.
“As Fashion Angels gains more and more attention from mass merchandisers, the SPS Commerce service is ready to expand with our business with little effort from my team,” continued Stenz. “My staff has been able to completely reallocate their time to more strategic activities that will deliver bottom-line results and more satisfied employees. Our decision to outsource our EDI with SPS Commerce is one that I would make again, and again.”
