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Longer lasting Belts, New Split Spools -- no regrind:Layout 1 8/26/2009 4: 37 AM Page 1
es were to fail.
Mobile just makes it so easy. Before, we
used to have a call center for our regular
orders. For our retail orders, we would call
around and say, “Can you go out and check
if you have that white dress in a size 8 for
me?” Then you’d have to wait a couple of
minutes while someone went out to the
floor to search for it.
Now, with distributed order management, it is not done via phone calls. You
come into the store in the morning, and
you go see which orders you need on your
mobile device. You use your mobile device
to go find it. You have a picture of the item
you’re looking for. You scan it to verify
that you have the right item, and if you
don’t have it, you notify the system and
the request is automatically sent to another
store in our chain.
QLet me shift gears for a moment. I understand that you start your team
meetings with what you call a “reality
roundup,” where you provide a work/life
lesson from a recent episode of a reality TV
show. Tell me about that.
AThe first couple of minutes while wait- ing for people to filter into the room, I
would chit-chat about a show I was watching, so it just evolved into, “Hey, I’m going
to start off every meeting telling you about
some shows you should check out along
with a lesson learned from what I watched
this past week.” It is nice because it kind
of sets a tone, a less formal tone, for the
meeting. People say they want to come to
the meetings because they know they’re
going to get a chuckle or maybe even find
out about a show they’ll want to check out.
QHow does that translate into the cul- ture of the facility?
AIt really makes it that much easier to be cross-functional because now you
have people from the merchandising area
and the accounting group coming to a
distribution-focused supply chain meeting,
where maybe normally they wouldn’t be all
that interested. They come for the reality
roundups, but they stay to listen to what is
going on and also to provide feedback on
different challenges they know are coming up in the supply chain in the next few
months.
points and getting our orders out
faster. Our two DCs are both on
the East Coast, but we can leverage a California store to ship to a
California customer so that instead
of taking five days for an order to
get there, it might take just one day.
QHave there been any particu- lar challenges in implementing
that?
ANo, not really. I think some of our most painful lessons were
the result of our thinking that we
were too different [from other types
of apparel retailers]. We didn’t
think that store fulfillment would
take off the way it did. Our first day
that we turned it on, we thought
we would maybe have five or six
orders at best, and we actually filled
700 units in a day. So it really
exceeded all of our expectations
of what having that much more
inventory available to the customer
could do for our sales. So it has been
a wonderful area in which we were
wrong.
QTo make that kind of fulfill- ment possible, how do the
stores connect with one another
and to the DC so that if I am in San
Diego, I can fulfill an order in San
Francisco?
ASome of the things we had to do to lay the foundation was make
sure that all stores have the right
supplies on hand to package orders
because those are just not the sort
of things that you have sitting in a
store backroom. We also wanted
to make sure we weren’t using too
much room in the backrooms so
that we could implement this without impacting the store footprint.
We taught them all how to do it on
their desktops. They do have mobile
devices, so we wanted them to have
a backup in case their mobile devic-
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