Supply Chain and Financials Management
Supply Chain and Financials Casestudy
Critical Process Optimized and Integrated with Supply Chain and Financial Systems
CLIENT: A leading designer and marketer of an extensive range of women's and men's fashion apparel and accessories ranging from casual to dressy.
CHALLENGE: The company needed to integrate the Letter of Credit functions of its new financial applications system with its supply chain system. Because letters of credit are a critical component within the supply chain process, worth $500 million annually to the company, it was vitally important to the implementation to have this electronic capability. The company was faced with returning to a manual process of “batching” together multiple order changes for inclusion within a Letter of Credit.
The company asked Visionet Systems to optimize the letter of credit process, develop the software application, and integrate it with both systems. Visionet was selected based on its
- in-depth experience with supply chain management systems for apparel industry
- knowledge of the apparel industry supply chain process
- expertise in supply chain Enterprise Application Integration (EAI)
SOLUTION: Visionet bridged the financial and sourcing systems by enhancing software functionality and integrating the business processes. This optimized the consolidation of multiple changes in letters of credit. The successful integration avoided the inefficiencies and the potential errors of a manual process.
RESULTS: Because banks charge $50 for each change in a letter of credit and there are about 2000 changes per year at the client, this optimization had a direct impact on profitability. The benefits of the letter of credit process optimization and integration with financial application and supply chain management systems were:
- $50,000 to $100,000 cost savings from consolidating changes
- Prevented the addition of $100,000 in labor costs
- ROI: 6 month payback on the investment
Visionet Systems is delivering world class business results to apparel, manufacturing, retail and wholesale industry through technology, consulting, and managed services.
