Business Challenge
GNC was faced with several difficult problems all converging after the Covid-19 pandemic. Consumer behavior changed, while supply and real estate costs went up, all the while technology evolved at the fastest pace ever seen. Existing tech systems were slowing down the team's ability to solve these challenges:
- Shipping rates were spread across multiple systems, hurting business continuity. Prices and complexity were going up while updates were out of sync, causing higher costs than needed.
- Carrier networks evolved quickly, and the team wanted to be more aggressive at diversifying their network in order to help control cost structures while still innovating and supporting customer experience strategies. It was proving too cumbersome to quickly add (and remove) carriers at warehouses and stores.
- Most legacy systems required external support to make changes, hitting the team with expensive fees to make the smallest changes necessary.
- Lastly, it was a company-wide strategic imperative to makes stores a central piece to operations and customer experience. The team needed new capabilities to streamline store fulfillment and shipping operations.
Shipium Solution
The team was looking to quickly transition to new technology partners who could help bring GNC into the modern era. They turned to Shipium to solve these challenges.
- Centralization of shipping operations into the Shipium Console gave the team a single-pane-of-glass to see all carriers, contracts, surcharges, and rules across the entire network, including warehouses and stores. Business continuity and visibility improved, giving the team more control over cost management.
- The team saw immediate flexibility and scalability gains with the Shipium platform. For example, adding a new store to the shipping network was now a process that took hours instead of months.
- Automated management of carrier rate tiers, groupings, and configurations increased the efficiency of carrier selection while also mapping it more closely to the team's operating strategy. Cost savings went up while errors went down.
- To help with the continual store strategy expansion, the team turned to Shipium to help add in last mile carriers who improve the costs for shipping from store while also improving the delivery speed and experience for customers.
Results
GNC saw three major structural benefits by deploying Shipium. First, management of shipping operations became faster and easier leading to improved operational gains.
- GNC increased flexibility and scalability, like adding new carriers or store nodes in a matter of hours, while eliminating service fees their previous solution would charge.
- With shipping operations centralized across warehouses and stores, visibility and continuity improved.
- Changing business rules took minutes instead of months, allowing the team to quickly adapt to regional changes as they happened.
Improved operations helped GNC move fast on their store expansion strategy that led to more strategic utilization of their store footprint.
- In-store utilization improved.
- Forward-deployment of inventory improved, helping with tighter allocation of inventory across the network.
- Product expiration decreased.
All this led to strong outcomes for both customers and internal operations.
- Time-in-transit got faster with more fulfillment and delivery happening from stores, leading to faster delivery times to customers. This helped improve customer satisfaction.
- The majority of shipments were lowered to Zone 2, reducing shipping costs.
- The team could now experiment faster with last mile carriers leading to continuous optimization of speed, cost, and on-time-delivery.
