Standardizing IT operations helps Broder Bros. cut fulfillment costs
Broder Bros. Co., a wholesale distributor of imprintable sportswear and accessories online and through catalogs, has cut warehousing, inventory and distribution costs by standardizing IT operations on Progress Software Corp.’s Progress OpenEdge platform. In peak periods, the company processes about 18,000 orders daily, it says.
Broder used the OpenEdge platform to integrate the operations of a series of acquisitions made over the past four years, says Mike Fabrico, vice president of IT at Broder Bros. The companies—Alpha Shirt Co., NES Clothing and Amtex Imports—were all running different systems at the time of acquisition. The company is approaching $1 billion in revenue for this year. The brands are marketed through three e-commerce sites—BroderBros.com, AlphaShirt.com and NESClothing.com.
Broder is in the process of consolidating its 16 distribution centers nationwide into nine centers, and running multiple brands out of each center. Orders from any of the three divisions—Broder, NES and Alpha—will be sent out using each brand’s packaging and billing materials.
“That’s one of the reasons we decided to stay with the OpenEdge platform,” Fabrico says. “We were able to rapidly enhance the system to meet the needs of the long-term strategy of Broder, which is to consolidate and have all three brands under a single distribution center.”
OpenEdge is a complete application development platform, including language, user interface, web server, application server, database and data and service integration features for e-commerce sites, says Neil Powers, vice president of products for Progress Software’s OpenEdge division. The platform is designed to handle all types of online transactions, including sales and inventory reporting and the fulfillment of orders.
Fabrico won’t disclose how much Broder has saved on warehousing, inventory and distribution costs, but he says the OpenEdge platform enables the company to run its business on a scalable, high-performance infrastructure that is maintained by a single database administrator.
“We’re able to support this environment and support the OpenEdge with a lot fewer resources and a lot fewer dollars than in other environments,” he says. “We have a single database administrator who is managing 55 databases.”
Broder uses an Enterprise Resource Planning application from FDM4 and a warehouse management system from IWS (Integrated Warehousing Solutions), both Progress application partners that base their applications on the OpenEdge platform.
“Over 90% of our applications are based on Progress Software technology and run with Progress OpenEdge databases,” he says. “During the peak summer months, the company processes approximately 18,000 orders a day and we consistently achieve systems availability in more than 99.95% of the time.”
Other Progress Software platforms have enabled Broder to make its entire product catalog—regardless of brand—easily accessible to all customers regardless of which of the three e-commerce sites they visit. “By deploying the Progress EasyAsk Integrated Search and Online Merchandising platform, we improved search functionality dramatically, resulting in increased web browsers-to-buyers conversion rates,” Fabrico says. He declined to give specifics.
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