Getting products out the door and into the hands of customers as fast as possible is a top priority for La Sportiva, but manual processes and limited visibility made it difficult to keep up with rapid growth. Many customers were larger dealers with complex shipping requirements and while La Sportiva transitioned EDI to SPS Commerce, it knew it needed a WMS and shipping solution that could seamlessly integrate to further expedite operations. 

“We had to create custom labels for EDI and label requirements and it would take months of creating the labels and testing them out, all of which cost a lot of money,” said Rebecca Carroll, Director of Operations at La Sportiva. 

Lack of visibility of inventory in the warehouse and manual pick processes slowed down operations as well. “Things would just show up in the warehouse and there was no real oversight into what we had for that day or that week or even that quarter as far as how much workload we actually had. That was one of our biggest pinch points,” said Dan Shaver, La Sportiva’s Warehouse Manager.

La Sportiva wanted a NetSuite-integrated solution that would automate order fulfillment workflows and support its rapidly growing business while delivering the best possible experience for every customer. It found the perfect fit with the ShipHawk WMS and shipping solution.

Since implementing ShipHawk’s WMS and TMS solutions, La Sportiva has cut its order processing time in half. The company is now able to process orders in just one to three days, compared to four to six under its old, manual system. It can also onboard new customers much more quickly thanks to ShipHawk’s EDI capabilities and integrations. “We don’t have to do as much manual lifting to get a big retail customer onboarded,” said Dani Larson, Operations Manager at La Sportiva. “ShipHawk has saved me probably an average of 20 hours a week with integrations alone. It is significantly faster.”

“Our customers have a lot of requirements. For us to be able to have SSCC labels automatically generated when we want to go live with the customer is invaluable,” added Rebecca Carroll. “EDI compliance is important because our customers value accuracy and, if we didn’t have an accurate system, we would not only be upsetting our customers, but we would be impacting our bottom line with additional NCF (non-compliance fee) charges.”

New customers translated to a higher volume of orders, and La Sportiva’s warehouse was up to the task because it had eliminated paper pick tickets and manual fulfillment processes that prevented its departments from communicating effectively. “ShipHawk has really helped us to reduce our shipping times so that our customers have a better shopping experience with us,” said Rebecca Carroll. “We shipped 250 orders on the first day and that’s pretty huge to transform all of our systems into a new one. We’ve also been able to streamline with information coming directly from NetSuite at the order level, to item fulfillment and the warehouse management system,
and then to the TMS.”

Now, La Sportiva is no longer working off of paper pick tickets and their dedicated team is able to fulfill orders faster and more accurately. “Without ShipHawk, I don’t think that we would have been able to scale to the size that we are now if we hadn’t implemented it when we did,” said Dani Larson. La Sportiva is also taking advantage of optimized batch processing, batching orders based on criteria including shortest travel distance required or on specific order types that require items be expedited or shipped with additional items.

Greater visibility and automated processes have enabled La Sportiva to reduce mis-ships and, more importantly, understand why they happen in the first place. Warehouse employees now use a handheld scanner to view inventory in real-time, versus pausing to log into NetSuite on a desktop.

“Since we’ve implemented ShipHawk WMS and TMS, we’ve probably hired an additional three or four employees, and we’ve been able to train them and get them picking and packing efficiently within a few days,” said Dan Shaver. 

“Having a WMS and TMS that is one company is invaluable, especially for a company our size, because it eliminates the need to have two different companies integrate. That’s exactly why we chose ShipHawk,” said Rebecca Carroll.