Up, up and away

“You need time to digest the change. There’s a shock sometimes,” Kennedy agrees. “We’d gone far enough to realize the business benefits of this investment, but not too far that it made us dysfunctional. Every day we were shipping product. We had customers to worry about. We couldn’t afford more than a digestible degree of distraction.”

The benefits
Within 30 days of the implementation, Spin Master had full visibility between its Toronto and Hong Kong offices, and the benefits have not stopped rolling in.

Since go-live, the company has more than doubled in size. It manages more than 500 active SKUs at any given time—and the mix is constantly changing, depending on what children deem ‘cool’.

On the international front, Spin Master now serves the US through a warehouse in Seattle. It has warehouses in France and the United Kingdom, and logistics partners in Hong Kong and Yantian, China. Earlier this year, it opened its first facility in Mexico.

In Canada the company is down to a single warehouse—an automated facility in Toronto run by Metro Canada Logistics.

At all locations, everyone has access to the same information in real-time.

“I can tell you what’s ready at a factory to be shipped any day of the week across any one of the SKUs we have in the company, across any of the factories we have,” explains Kennedy. “We have in-transit visibility to every shipment leaving the factory, we know every delivery date, we know the ship it’s on, the container it’s in, the day it’s arriving at the port. We know when it’s cross-docked, which train it’s on and when it’s arriving.

“We have the visibility to allow us to work with our 3PLs to optimize loads, negotiate better terms and look for ways to save more money collectively. We’ve been able to give those providers more business as a result, so their business is impro
ving, too.”

The benefits of this also travel down the supply chain.

“I can also tell you what the demand side of our business is, in terms of what our retailers are looking for—what their point-of-sale needs are, what their inventory needs are, what they have in stock at their DCs. And we can determine whether our supply chain has sufficient in-transit or staged inventory at any minute of the day,” Kennedy says.

In early 2008, with employees fully versed in the system, the company began phase two of the implementation: incorporating analytics. Staff members now aggregate and correlate data about how retail customers are choosing and promoting products. Doing this gives the company the ability to line up orders
from the factory right down to the end consumer’s choice. This information has helped the company shorten lead times, increase forecast accuracy and collaborate better with retailers on potential sale items and promotions.