What started as a two-person shop in 2005, Redcat Racing has grown and transitioned from a business-to-business operation that sold a small number of large orders to a direct-to-consumer eCommerce company that now sells a large number of small orders. As a result, the team at Redcat knew it needed to make a change in its pick, pack, and ship strategy.

While its WMS was in place, without an advanced fulfillment solution to round out the process, shipping errors would continue to plague the operation. Previously, the Picker would also pack the order, check that the correct products were there, write down the box size and weight on a piece of paper, and then send the box down to the employee printing out packing slips. This manual process often resulted in the customer receiving the wrong item or missing something altogether. “It was a big problem,” said Mike Friery, Director of Operations at Redcat Racing. “When you’re shipping the wrong items to customers it makes you look really cheap.” On top of that, when customers would reach out about the incorrect orders, Redcat wouldn’t always receive the mis-shipped items back, meaning they were losing out on more than just the customer’s trust.

Order processing times also suffered. First, Redcat tried using a shipping software that wasn’t directly integrated with NetSuite, and as a result, they’d end up waiting around for shipping labels to load in NetSuite. When that failed, they tried using their WMS for packing, which was painfully slow. “The user interface lagged, it wasn’t robust and it didn’t offer any kinds of suggestions on packing,” said Friery.