How Lifetime Brands became an A+ vendor

The challenge

Without visibility into the precise factors contributing to mounting costs in the form of chargebacks, Lifetime Brands could neither easily identify nor address the source of non-compliant shipments.

Real-world results

With SPS Commerce, Lifetime Brands:

• Improved their vendor score from an F to an A+ with their largest U.S. retailer, creating additional sell-through opportunities and recapturing hundreds of thousands of dollars in revenue.
• Reduced problems associated with non-compliant shipments, which reduced chargeback costs and contributed to overall performance improvements.
• Gained access to comprehensive performance boards to view actionable information including charges, charge reversal, fill rate and more.

Poor compliance ratings

Lifetime Brands was consistently receiving lower compliance ratings from its top retailer in the U.S., leading to mounting costs in the form of chargebacks and potential lost revenue. Solving the problem was a matter of gaining visibility and understanding the supply chain issues that were contributing to the rise in non-compliant shipments. The standard scorecard Lifetime Brands was receiving from its retailer was not sufficiently detailed to allow the company to identify the source of the problems and make course corrections that would lead to better outcomes.

As a company with over 20 leading brands, Lifetime manages a large number of distribution centers. Identifying which were the source of each particular issue proved a costly and time-intensive endeavor. In fact, allocating the resources required to manually identify vendor-compliance issues was a larger source of lost revenue than the chargebacks themselves.

For many, ignoring the problem or simply accepting the chargebacks as a cost of doing business seemed to be the only good solutions. Jerry Glinnen, Director of Vendor Compliance at Lifetime Brands, found this deeply unsatisfying. After Jerry learned that Lifetime Brands had received an F vendor rating, the lowest score possible, from their leading U.S. retailer, he contacted SPS to learn more about their solution, a supplier subscription service that aligns retailer and supplier incentives and improves supplier performance.

“With SPS Commerce, I can determine—in mere minutes—which distribution center is the source of any given problem. It pays for itself.”

– Jerry Glinnen, Director of Vendor Compliance, Lifetime Brands

How Lifetime Brands became an A+ vendor

Lifetime Brands and their top U.S. retailer now share a unified view of performance with a custom scorecard that allows Jerry to drill into the details of each metric to perform root-cause analysis and troubleshoot supply chain issues in seconds, before they become a bigger problem.

For example, when Jerry sees something like a 98% fill rate on his scorecard, he wants to know what the problem is with 2% of the purchase order. With SPS, he is able to see exactly how and where the problems occurred. He can then put the information in his core execution systems and give distributors advanced information.

Jerry also uses the SPS solution to address problems related to chargebacks. When he receives a chargeback from a retailer, he needs to figure out which distribution center the problem came from. Before working with SPS, this was a time-consuming task since Lifetime Brands manages multiple distribution centers and its retailer did not identify which one was the source of the problem. With SPS, Jerry is able to figure out which distribution center has the problem in minutes.

Lifetime Brands also has access to specialized performance panels, including a Recent Account Activity panel where users can see all the charges deducted, resolved disputes, and reversals applied by their retailer over the last 30 days. They can also view open disputes and drill into the details of each.

The solution’s This Year/Last Year panel instantly shows Lifetime Brands if they are winning or losing the chargeback battle, comparing this year to last year for the last 30 days and for the trailing 12 months.

With access to these comparative metrics, Lifetime Brands and other suppliers can easily benchmark performance. This kind of historic visibility helps Lifetime Brands rapidly identify any lapses in performance long before they become critical, systemic problems.

Over the course of the next two-and-a-half years, Lifetime Brands’ vendor rating with their largest U.S. retailer rose from an F to an A+, which has helped the company recapture hundreds of thousands of dollars in revenue. Solving for the causes of non-compliant shipments not only reduced chargeback costs but also contributed to overall performance improvements.

As a result of their supplier transformation, Lifetime Brands was also invited by its retailer to train other suppliers on how to become A certified.

The benefits of the SPS solution extend to the retailer as well. The solution has helped a significant number of the same retailer’s many suppliers improve their performance.

SPS drives high-performance partnerships. And good partnerships are good for business.