Software: Outdoor retailer turns to cloud-based WMS

Moosejaw, a specialty retailer that sells outdoor gear and apparel to dedicated sports enthusiasts, has a growing footprint, reaching customers through its Web site, catalog and nine retail stores across the country.

Strong sales and increased popularity have helped the company expand both in terms of storefronts and distribution space. Not only does the company plan to open new stores in Boulder, Colo., and Kansas City in 2012, it will nearly double the size of its 42,000-square-foot DC by adding 36,000 additional square feet to accommodate more than 30,000 SKUs.

To support its multi-channel growth over the past decade, Moosejaw developed a homegrown paper-based order and inventory management system to support the overall distribution and tracking of inventory. But to keep pace with its growth and protect the customers’ multi-channel shopping experience, Moosejaw is always in the lookout for improved processes. Most recently, managers came to the important realization that they could nearly eliminate the probability of lost orders and increase inventory accuracy through a full-featured, cloud-based warehouse management system (WMS; HighJump, highjump.com).

“The customer experience is essential to the Moosejaw brand,” says Chad Caudill, director of customer service and warehouse operations. “Our exceptional customer loyalty is the result of doing things differently from top to bottom, from advertising to distribution. It’s our nature to look for any opportunity to make the shopping experience flawless for the customer, so it was an easy decision to move into WMS.”

In mid-2011, Moosejaw deployed a WMS in the cloud to manage its distribution operations. The results were immediate. After only a few months, the company experienced a 20% reduction in labor costs and eliminated the need to perform physical inventory counts. “Our inventory cycle counting accuracy has risen to over 98% and we’ve reduced our percentage of lost orders to 0.2%,” says Caudill.

“Saving the business money is part of the equation,” Caudill adds, “but it’s a distant second to the value of happy customers.”