As distributors to both online retailers and smaller specialty stores, the Wholegood team has a wide variety of inventory and customer orders to accommodate. Additionally, their warehouse receives and ships various specialized products with a limited shelf life. Leading up to 2023, they were scaling tremendously, with 350 percent business growth over six years. “We’ve doubled our warehousing space in the last few years, so we were looking for a warehouse management system to help us,” said Rob Gillman, Wholegood’s Systems and Infrastructure Director.
To accomplish their inventory goals, they chose RF-SMART to completely update their supply chain process. “We were choosing between RF-SMART and a different third-party WMS and were encouraged by the NetSuite experts and peer reviews to go with RF-SMART.”
LEANING ON THE NETSUITE EXPERTS
As with all RF-SMART customers, Rob and his team came into their RF-SMART implementation with a set of specific inventory control goals they hoped to accomplish. Their chief concern was improving inventory visibility and accuracy. “We went from being a small wholesaler that only had 200 SKUs to now having over 2,000 SKUs, so increased stock control was the main objective when moving to RF-SMART,” said Rob.
Each piece of their incoming inventory is also lot controlled, so they needed a high level of organization on the floor to keep picking running smoothly. “We deal with a lot of short shelf lives and have to make sure stock is being picked from the right lot number and the right bin,” said Rob. Without sufficient organization and tracking in their warehouse, they risked losing products and resources due to expiration dates. RF-SMART enabled them to scan received items into their warehouse and track them throughout their whole fulfillment process, allowing their team to navigate past these accuracy concerns. “With RF-SMART, we have greater accuracy in inventory control and picking, which leads to reduced stock wastage or losses due to incorrect stock rotation,” said Rob. “RF-SMART gives us the visibility benefits we were looking for.”
SAVING TIME AND RESOURCES
As time went on, Wholegood was receiving a growing number of smaller orders. Because of this, they prioritized optimizing their fulfillment process in the hopes of seeing greater efficiency returns. “Before the switch to RF-SMART, we were manually fulfilling in NetSuite, order by order, line by line,” said Rob. “Our team of six or seven people were having to manually record which lot number we had picked from on a daily basis.” This process opened the door for user error and was taking up considerable amounts of worker time.
Fulfilling orders with RF-SMART minimized these concerns. The Wholegood team has more than doubled the number of orders picked each day with RF-SMART’s barcode-scanning system. Additionally, these fulfillments only require two support team members, freeing up resources to apply to other areas of their supply chain. These labor and time improvements are ultimately improving their customer’s experience. Previously, they would have to wait for all the orders to be picked and dispatched before they could start invoicing back to the customer through NetSuite. “Some of our customers would request an Advanced Ship Notice (ASN), and now we are able to provide that in advance of the shipment,” said Rob. “RF-SMART has given us a much quicker response time for our customers,” said Rob.
TRAINING PRIORITY
With over 50 users in their warehouse, Wholegood takes their in-house user training seriously. Rob and his team used the resources they received from the RF-SMART support team to create a Super User for their internal training. “The RF-SMART support team was great during our training and we really enjoyed working with them,” said Rob. “We now use a train-the-trainer approach and preparing our staff to use RF-SMART works like clockwork.” RF-SMART’s easy-to-adopt solution has allowed their nearly 24/7 operations to keep running smoothly, decreasing onboarding frustration and productivity lag times.
FUTURE-PROOF SOLUTION
After a successful implementation and user adoption, the Wholegood team continues to lean on the RF-SMART experts to scale their supply chain. “There are advanced features of RF-SMART that we aren’t currently using, but as our growth carries on, we can continue to leverage those solutions,” said Rob. Using the “crawl, walk, run” method, they are making conscious decisions on how to best invest and implement solutions as they find new warehousing challenges to tackle. “RF-SMART gives us scope for the future as we continue in this growth phase of our business. It’s good to know that those options are available for when we need them.”