Back in 2003, Charlie Kantz, vice president of logistics and warehousing for specialty retailer Bakers Footwear Group, knew he needed to improve shipment speed from his suppliers in China to the company’s 200 U.S. stores—and its fashion-hungry consumer base.

At the time, Bakers’ process for transporting it shoes was based on shipping dates set by its buyers. These dates kicked off a sequence in which Kantz and his team had to scramble to secure the next available ocean carrier or plane to move the shoes to the U.S. The process was proving costly and inefficient, and simply wasn’t sophisticated enough to track freight across the globe to meet the growing demands of a just-in-time market.

“What was missing from our approach,” says Kantz, “was trackability; the ability to know where all our freight is down to the carton level, from factory to store—with a real-time visibility component.” A tall order, yet Kantz set off to improve the process from China. He teamed up with his freight forwarder to establish a system that now offers Bakers full supply chain visibility, moves product through the pipeline 40 percent faster, reduces processing charges, and has cut freight rates on the lane by 15 percent—and has earned Kantz and Bakers Footwear the 2007 Best Practices Bronze.

According to Kantz, the company’s old process of relying on the company’s buyers to set shipping dates from its 20-to-40 China-based vendors left much to be desired. It would invariably result in a half of a container or TEU (twenty-foot equivalent) being transported multiple times per week instead of allowing his team to create a FEU (forty-foot equivalent unit) or multiple air containers on one airbill, says Kantz. He realized something had to change.

“We started creating shipping dates based on the open-to-buy weeks that the buyers use,” says Kantz. “This allowed the buyers to have set dates to give to all of their vendors so that we could consolidate merchandise out of China.” In that case, the buyers would be assured that the merchandise would arrive within their open-to-buy window, adds Kantz.

Creating these set ship dates would prove to be his first step to changing the entire process out of China. Step two involved Bakers moving some of its domestic shipping processes—such as pre-labeling packages—to the point of origin in China so freight can bypass the DCs and not get delayed. “When things get hung up at DCs, you lost control of your freight,” explains Kantz. “And in the fashion world things change every minute.”

However, while pre-labeling packages was moved to the freight forwarder in China, it wasn’t without its challenges, says Kantz. “The process of labeling the cartons contained a high margin of error because it involves somebody in the warehouse reading a label on a carton and then matching it up to a pre-printed label with the same information,” says Kantz. “This process can be time consuming and tedious, especially when you are working on 5,000 cartons in a day.”

Not a problem to be overlooked, considering that Bakers receives approximately 4 million units of footwear annually, of which roughly 2 million come into the U.S. from China. This situation led Kantz to collaborate with his freight forwarder, Transmodal Associates, and their software partner, IES. Kantz worked with Transmodal to implement a process that would allow Bakers to move expedited air freight from the vendor locations in China to its U.S. locations without re-labeling it after shipping.

Kantz and Transmodal collaborated again to launch a system that enabled Bakers to continue pre-labeling cartons in China—as it had been doing—but with a barcode that can be scanned as each carton passes checkpoints, or “milestones,” the supply chain, giving Kantz real-time data on the location of the cartons. The same barcode is then utilized at Bakers Los Angeles-based 3PL, Trimodal Transportation Services, to direct the cartons to the company’s more than 200 stores.

This new process has been part of standard operating procedure for Bakers for the past year and a half on the airfreight side and two years for ocean shipping—and has resulted in significant time and cost savings improvements.

According to Kantz, the company is now moving airfreight to its U.S. stores in three to five days compared to seven to 10 days with the previous process; it has realized a 15-percent reduction in freight costs on the lane; and Bakers now has the ability to move freight through Trimodal’s process 40 percent faster and, in turn, has cut its processing charges 30 percent.

Kantz adds that the pre-printed barcode process now allows Bakers to scan the label on the outside of the carton at the Trimodal facility in Los Angeles, print out the shipping label for that carton, and then ship it directly to the store without having to match up two labels. This has allowed the shipper to increase its productivity from 65 to 70 cartons per hour to roughly 100 cartons per hour and reduce labor costs by 25 percent.

These steps have made Kantz better equipped to track freight, regardless of its location in the supply chain. One other perk of this system, adds Kantz, is that rather than having to bump up staffing levels, he was able to configure this process to gain complete supply chain visibility and maintain his staff of two—himself and his import administrator.