End-to-End Solution for Distribution Center
“The system requires very little maintenance and simply works flawlessly. We are now able to handle our existing workload with ease and are prepared for years of growth.”
Don Gaston
Distribution Center Manager
First Tennessee
The Challenge: First Tennessee Bank (FTB) operates a full-time distribution center to handle the distribution of forms, brochures, and supplies to its 1800+ branches and mortgage centers across the country. New branches and money centers are opened every month. This growth was putting an ever-increasing strain on the distribution center. Faced with the need to add more personnel to meet the demand, FTB decided it was time to improve the operation. The answer was clear - give customers the ability to place orders online and track orders throughout the fulfillment process. The distribution center also wanted to implement bar coding to increase the ease and accuracy of picking orders.
The Solution: “The First Tennessee project was different from other e-commerce sites in that it’s customers were all internal clients,” stated Greg Spence of Vanick Group. “Because billing was handled internally and needed to be integrated with their existing account system, we decided to create a customer e-commerce application based on Microsoft’s ASP platform and SQL Server database.” The first step to improving the fulfillment process was to create a warehousing system for associating locations with the products. Once products were assigned locations and barcodes were created, the system could now intelligently direct employees to the proper places when pulling orders. Once items are pulled, they are taken to the shipping area where they are boxed and shipping labels are printed via FedEx or UPS shipping systems. Employees use the barcode scanner to scan the tracking number on the label, which not only associates the order with a tracking number, but flags the order as shipped in the system. Additional scanner applications were written to manage cycle-counts, inventory receiving, customer returns, item look-ups, and more.
The Benefits: Within the first 30 days of implementation, over 80% of First Tennessee’s customers were using the online system, drastically reducing the manpower needed to manually process phone and fax orders. Not only has it saved the cost of paper, fax, and telephone costs, but the amount of time taken to pull orders was reduced by 33%, allowing the staff to handle many more orders without increasing headcount.