El Palacio de Hierro is challenged with increasing customer demands for 100 percent product availability and fast, accurate delivery of their orders. Add in the company’s rapid growth and wide selection of merchandise and itis clear why their DC operations can be hectic.
Their Mexico City DC receives shipments from suppliers via scheduled appointments, as well as imported goods, and provides inventory storage, store replenishment, and cross-docking functions. It also ships direct to customers and stores and processes store and customer returns. There are over 19,000 floor and rack stock locations for picking orders for home delivery and store replenishment. Blue Yonder’s warehouse management capability supports all of these operations, providing significant cost and throughput benefits.
Business continuity
The number one goal for the WMS implementation was to create business continuity by eliminating system downtime. “The most significant benefit for our organization is achieving operational stability, thanks to the Blue Yonder tools. In the past, we used to experience significant operational breakdowns that led to very long wait times for our providers and brought operations to a halt. We have achieved this stability since the implementation.”
Improving customer service
Another goal for El Palacio de Hierro was to increase operational efficiency and accuracy across many functions to improve customer service while supporting an aggressive five-year growth plan. The implementation resulted in significantly improved inventory visibility and accuracy, increased labor productivity and substantially improved order delivery times to customers and stores.
Solution benefits
100 percent inventory visibility reduced inventory errors by 75 percent and increased inventory accuracy to 99.96 percent. Labor productivity increased 30 percent, resulting in US$ 580,000 in annual saving. Order picking accuracy improved to 99.78 percent. Order response times improved substantially, with delivery times for customer orders improving 30 percent and store deliveries improving 25 percent.
