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Forzani is the only national sporting goods chain in the country. And for good reason. Canada presents national retailers with daunting logistical challenges. Most of the country's population is scattered across a zone that stretches along more than 3,000 miles of the U.S.-Canadian border. Winter weather is often brutal, gumming up shipping.
"Companies in the New York-Philadelphia corridor can probably do the same volume of business as we do in the whole country," Sartor says. "The only way to win is to be the best you can be. Supply chain is absolutely critical to our success. Moving stuff around is key. It's all about right product, right time, right store."
That hasn't been easy. In 1999, when Keith Lambert joined the company as director of supply chain, technology was primitive. "IT was not a major driver of the business," he says. "The warehouse was using a paper-based picking system."
In 2000, Forzani deployed a warehouse management system (WMS), but the company soon outgrew it. The challenge was a dizzying array of branded stores totaling more than 5 million square feet of retail space that needed to be stocked from the distribution centers in Calgary and Toronto.
In 2001, desperately needing a technology overhaul, Forzani hired Gillis as CIO, who at the time ran IT for Staples Inc.'s Canadian operations. Working with Sartor, she devised a plan to replace Forzani's major IT systems, including the warehouse management system, along with merchandise management and point of sale (POS). On top of that, there were five acquisitions to integrate.
"The key business objectives of this project," as Gillis once articulated them, "are to optimize sales in our stores by more effectively and flexibly allocating products and to increase the responsiveness of our distribution centers to our stores through faster dock-to-stock times."
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