Corporate Express Promotional Marketing Maximizes Vendor Collaboration with Frontstep's Supply Chain Solution

From customer order entry, through shipping and billing, Corporate Express Promotional Marketing (CEPM) envisioned a supply chain that allowed seamless operations and provided increased inventory visibility and order tracking throughout the fulfillment process. The next step was to find a solution provider that shared this vision. They found Frontstep.

In order to synchronize their supply chain in real time, Corporate Express Promotional Marketing chose Frontstep to help them build a real-time, automated and synchronized supply chain. "We searched for a solution provider that had solutions flexible enough to interface with many different technologies and various sized companies. Frontstep meets these criteria and have extensive experience with the business of vendor integration," says Dennis Multack, CEPM, president.

Corporate Express Promotional Marketing is one of the world's leading providers of centrally managed merchandise-based brand and corporate identity programs. As a business unit of Corporate Express, a Burhmann company, CEPM specializes in the assembly and distribution of promotional and advertising specialty items with company logos affixed to them.

Most of Corporate Express Promotional Marketing's programs are centered on a core promotional merchandise catalog. Items can be selected from an all-encompassing catalog for all business needs or targeted catalogs for specific promotional requirements. In all, there are over 10,000 items available.

Focusing on customer satisfaction

With various size customers such as AT&T, Bank One, Honda and Pfizer, Corporate Express Promotional Marketing believes in giving its customers the information they need, when they need it. "Our company focuses on Fortune 500 clients, and a good part of that relationship includes communications of ordering and billing processes. That's why we developed interactive Internet solutions for our clients. The customers can enter an order and search for order status information online according to their schedule, not ours. And Frontstep continues to help us improve and expedite this information," states Multack.

Continually striving to provide their customers with the richest experience, Corporate Express Promotional Marketing has two goals for Frontstep's CustomerSynchronized™ Collaborative Solutions. The first is to align internal and external supply chain processes with customer expectations and the second is to reduce transaction costs and improve the speed of providing superior customer service. The company is seeing both of these goals come to fruition.

"Previously, we felt like we had offered as much as we could offer our customers relative to order tracking. Our real problem was placing orders with our vendors. So, in an effort to continue pleasing our customers, we knew it was time to attack real-time vendor integration," continues Multack.

Reducing transaction costs

The promotional items industry is a high-volume, low transaction, custom-driven market. Each order is unique because corporate identity specifications need to be adhered to when affixing a logo to any promotional item - and the order is not necessarily repeatable. "Our customers want a timely, cost effective operation and solution - a sentiment that I believe is not unique to this industry. So, from that standpoint, we need faster access to information and we need to cut costs out of our entire manufacturing and distribution process," says Chet Brown, CEPM senior director, inventory and distribution.

"With Frontstep supply chain solutions, we're electronically communicating documents like purchase orders, order acknowledgements and advance shipping notifications with our vendors on a real-time basis," continues Brown. "That allows us to take a very manual and inefficient process and automate it to be quicker, more accurate and more cost-effective."

From sourcing to purchase order management and invoicing, Corporate Express Promotional Marketing also wanted to reduce the number of phone calls needed to complete a transaction. The company deals with thousands of vendors and it was taking anywhere from five to ten phone calls to finish a transaction. Phone calls were being made to perform price checks, locate inventory and capacity and review order status-all processes that can be improved with automation. "In looking at the cost structure, we reduce the number of phone calls being made to vendors per transaction with vendor integration. Because the order management process, shipping process and eventually the billing process between us and our vendors will be automated, we cut the number of phone calls in half," states Multack.

Using technology as a differentiator

"We have the opportunity to leverage technology in our industry, and it is our primary investment for capital spending. Technology, which is a strength of ours, is also a competitive advantage that we have in the marketplace," says Fred Meyer, CEPM VP of finance and operations.

"Frontstep helped us develop the system that we use today, and Frontstep will be there when we build the solution for tomorrow," continues Meyer. "This is a fully integrated, multisite supply chain solution, which is somewhat unique in the environment of promotional marketing. And we think that puts us in the driver seat as a customer-centric company with the technology solutions to support collaboration among all the functions of our business."

Concludes Multack, "Frontstep is not only a software vendor for Corporate Express Promotional Marketing, we view them as a partner that is committed to helping us build the solution that addresses our specific needs and the capabilities of our suppliers."