HoMedics Gets New Visibility And A Healthier Supply Chain

A family-owned company founded in 1987, HoMedics is headquartered in Commerce Township, Michigan. Acquisitions of Oak Brook, Illiniois' Taylor Precision Products and UK-based Salter Housewares™ in 2002 and 2004 expanded the company's product line and distribution network. Today, HoMedics manufactures a complete line of home personal healthcare, wellness and relaxation products, which are distributed through retailers worldwide.

With an overseas manufacturing base, rising volumes, increasing number of suppliers and growing demands from retailers for high levels of service and guaranteed lead times, HoMedics faced escalating challenges and an increasingly complex supply chain. According to Keith Allison, operations director of Salter, "We were looking at 70-90 days for inbound shipments and needed to reduce that time significantly. We also needed to ease the variability of inbound and outbound lead times."

HoMedics and Salter lacked crucial capabilities. HoMedics had no way to generate UCC128 labels for its overseas manufacturers, lacked ASN capability and could not generate labels in-house in compliance with the Top 100 Retailers initiative. In the UK, Salter had no way to share shipping information with its trading partners and struggled to gain visibility to the inbound flow of goods from China.