Overview
Booster, a K-12 school fundraising company, experienced significant growth and operational improvements since implementing Deposco’s warehouse management software. Struggling with complexities in receiving and replenishment, Booster implemented Deposco to simplify fulfillment processes with rapid value and a robust platform that creates labor efficiencies and flexes with future growth.
Flexible solutions for complex challenges
Booster’s operations involve event-based fundraising, custom apparel manufacturing, and seasonal logistics. They had relied on an outdated WMS that was simply an inventory locator system. The transition to Deposco’s modern WMS with Supply Chain Planning (SCP) has been transformative.
Like many Deposco customers, Booster has a very unique business model. In custom apparel decoration, clients can choose from about 360,000 different items. Apparel doesn’t come barcoded; you just receive a bag or box of garments. We worked with them to build customized handheld display screens in the receiving process, including items coming in various styles, colors, and sizes, ensuring accurate data matches, even for items with missing barcodes.
They also operate as a 3PL during their Boosterthon events. These events require both manufacturing and distribution/packaging of rewards-focused prizes designed to motivate kids at 4,500 clients annually across the U.S.
Deposco has incredible flexibility to generate solutions for complex problems across so many different processes. With us, it’s not just one-track receiving, wave picking, outbound. We have all kinds of staging and replenishment processes related to manufacturing on our apparel decoration operations. Being able to come up with all that was really helpful.
Solution
“The forecasting, off-shore procurement, and receiving process for these events is a challenge because 80% of our inventory happens between May and August – often with 15 containers delivered in one week. We don’t want to disappoint a client in March who can’t get what they need because it’s stuck on the water. It all arrives at our warehouse, and then the rest of the year, it’s outbound distribution to all these different clients.”
Moreover, the WMS has streamlined Booster’s inventory replenishment, particularly for their manufacturing operations, to significantly reduce manual intervention, leading to more efficient operations and better multi-location fulfillment.
Highly integrated multi-location fulfillment
“Deposco being able to handle multi-location fulfillment in an integrated way in the cloud is really valuable to us,” said Powell.
“Even if I’m not at the facility, I have a pulse on exactly what’s going on. Through Deposco’s amazing dashboards and reporting, I can see all our team’s activity and know exactly what’s going on. I can identify issues, Slack our team, and resolve them. It has given our admin staff that flexibility too. So they’re not on-site, they can still provide value in their job, guide the team, and we stay productive.
One of the most impressive outcomes has been a dramatic improvement in order turnaround times. Before Deposco, their standard turnaround for custom apparel orders was around 10 days. Deposco cut this in half. This is a testament of the system’s ability push work to employees rather than having them search for tasks, thereby increasing productivity.
After losing five workers during their busiest season, they wanted to start hiring in January. Instead, they decided to ride it out for two more weeks. The efficiencies of Deposco got them through the whole spring without hiring, which was 15% of their labor they didn’t need to replace in the spring.
Faster turnaround times have also enabled Booster to pull orders forward in the schedule, resulting in their lowest labor and outsourcing costs ever relative to their revenue the previous fall.
Deposco’s scalable, cloud-based SaaS WMS allows for real-time visibility and control that supports Booster’s growth ambitions. By managing their operations effectively with Deposco even when not on-site, Booster can continue to expand and explore new opportunities.
Additionally, the system’s ability to handle multi-facility operations is a significant advantage. Booster plans to deploy Deposco at a second facility in Easley, SC, further enhancing operational capabilities and supporting their growth strategy.
Booster’s partnership with Deposco has been a game-changer in making multi-location fulfillment easier, opening up new revenue streams and operational savings, and establishing robust platform flexibility.
Deposco is very hands-on in their implementation and we felt the culture match from Day 1. With Deposco, it’s always, ‘Based on my understanding of our platform and yours, here’s a potential solution.’ The approach has been that collaborative. I work to help Deposco understand our platform. I learn the possibilities of Deposco; in the same way, they’re reciprocating that so that we can ideate and build solutions together. It’s truly a synergistic partnership that has been awesome.
Partner in Future Growth
Something I love is that, once we were through go-live, Deposco helped us go back and revisit any process we felt was highly customized. The team continued to think about that and go, ‘How can we get this back into the base product?’ That was really valuable for me. Deposco is amazing. I hope that team is here for years and years.
