The Case of E-Commerce

The new sites import Web orders directly into Caldrea’s accounting system. From there, they flow to the InSite shipping software. If the product is in stock and there’s a person standing ready to grab it, the package could theoretically be on the dock and scheduled with UPS or FedEx within five minutes.

The new e-commerce setup also allows for the addition of a B-to-B component in the future. Caldrea and Mrs. Meyer’s products are currently being sold to approximately 2,000 retail companies with as many as 5,000 outlets, so supplying those sellers makes up a significant proportion of the company’s business.

The new efficiency would not have been possible without some back-end reconfiguration. InSite offered advice on the best layout for the shipping area. “We had to help them configure what’s called a single-pick environment, where they’re actually picking the individual item and packing it for e-commerce,” says Brian Strojny, president of InSite. “Prior to that, their business was all cases and pallets [because Digital River was doing the order fulfillment]. Nearly every company wants to do individual Internet sales because it can be more profitable, but the trick is to do it without having to change a lot of your internal processes or add a bunch of staff. We helped them with that optimization.”

One of the most significant challenges of Caldrea’s e-commerce initiative has been the company’s extremely promotion-driven nature. There’s always some kind of sale or gift-with-purchase going on. “One of the things that they needed was some fairly robust promotion tools,” Strojny says. “We have a promotion engine in our software. There are some basic promotions built in, and we added some of their unique promotion types into the tool, so that the client can deploy them without having to call one of our programmers. That’s fairly typical—on an average project, about 70 percent of the functionality is already part of our software, and the other 30 percent would include tailoring the user interface to suit the client and any unique business rules they might have.”

The entire planning and implementation process took about three months, Nassif says, and the details are revisited periodically whenever the sites undergo a redesign. “Integrating a Web site with any back-end accounting process is always tricky, but InSite is very good at this [type of] challenge.”

“The point of it was time and money,” Strojny says. “They wanted to reduce the amount of time it took to ship an order. An e-commerce order, by nature, should be the most profitable order in the company [by being the least expensive to fill]. In most companies, it’s getting touched by an individual as it’s reentered into the [enterprise resource planning] system. Then it’s getting printed out and carried around, so it’s fairly labor-intensive. The goal here was to cut some of the manual processes out of e-commerce.”