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Modern EDI Brings New Capabilities to an Old West Brand
January 12, 2022
Headquartered in Tyler, Texas, Cavender’s is a busy retailer with an unbridled passion for western wear. The company began as Cavender’s Boot City in 1965 and has since become the nation’s top retailer for many prestigious western and work wear brands, such as Lucchese, Justin, Tony Lama, Laredo, Nocona, Rocky Mountain, and Wrangler. The family-owned brand now operates 88 stores in 12 states and has a thriving eCommerce storefront to boot.
When Larry Waterman joined Cavender’s in 2018 as Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer, he felt that in order for the company to maintain its competitive edge and continue to meet the evolving needs of vendors and customers, it would need to implement a truly cutting-edge EDI solution.
Out with the Old, In with the New
Waterman and his team investigated a variety of EDI integrations that could replace their legacy EDI tool, which couldn’t support Cavender’s planned growth initiatives. They wanted to implement a solution that would work with their existing Jesta IS Vision Suite ERP platform and enable them to be the best partner possible to their vendors. Cavender’s aimed to expand its inventory to bring more offerings to customers and leverage advanced analytics to harness their data and capture actionable business insights. Whatever solution Cavender’s chose, it would have to enable them to grow intelligently.
After connecting with TrueCommerce representatives at a conference, Cavender’s ultimately settled on the TrueCommerce-ecUtopia platform to solve their challenges and give them more agility in a constantly changing retail market.
Intelligent Tech Yields Superior Results
Once the TrueCommerce-ecUtopia platform was in place, Cavender’s started seeing improvements quickly. A key advantage the TrueCommerce-ecUtopia platform brought to the table was improved collaboration with Cavender’s’ largest vendors.
“We’re now able to provide them with analytics that support their production and distribution planning and ultimately help ensure that we have the right products in the right place at the right time,” says Waterman. This factor alone has given Cavender’s an excellent return on their investment in new technology.
In addition, TrueCommerce’s EDI solution has given Cavender’s multiple ways to become more productive internally. Many laborious manual processes have been replaced with smart, sleek, automated alternatives. Three-way matching of POs, packing slips, and invoices is accomplished simply with an easy-to-use interface, enabling efficiency gains that are felt across departments, including purchasing and accounts receivable.
For example, using their old EDI solution, Cavender’s merchandising department once heard about vendors not shipping or shortshipping only when they received a call from a store manager. Now, exception handling is automated, flagging everything from a price discrepancy between an invoice and a PO to reporting when products don’t make it on the road to customers. That is what Waterman describes as incredible business enablement.
By allowing technology to take over the work of data entry, Cavender’s can both enhance internal collaboration, and focus its human resources on customer-facing tasks that improve vendor relationships and aid the company’s growth.
Yielding Optimum Results with a Three-Way Partnership
One of the most important ways that Cavender’s has benefitted from working with TrueCommerce is how effectively TrueCommerce integrated their EDI solution with Cavender’s well-established Jesta Vision Suite ERP Platform. Cavender’s had been working with Jesta since 1997 and wanted to keep what was already working for them and optimize it while adding new EDI capabilities. Waterman was pleased with how synergistic the relationship between the three companies became and how together, they were able to “evolve our overall solution along a very aggressive timeline.” With the Jesta solution working alongside TrueCommerce, Cavender’s was able to turn their supply chain into a masterpiece of efficiency.
A Better Bottom Line for Everyone
Cavender’s new EDI-driven capabilities are giving them end-to-end visibility into their supply chain, helping cut costs and lead times, optimize inventory, and get ahead of product availability issues.
Looking ahead, Cavender’s has the tools they need to do business in more directions, enabling them to leverage advanced data analytics to improve revenue streams and take advantage of new distribution strategies—potentially even vendor managed inventory or vendor managed analytics. Cavender’s considers TrueCommerce-ecUtopia EDI an investment in their future, empowering them to build new and stronger vendor relationships, find new efficiencies, and ensure a superior experience for their end customers.
If you would like to learn more about Cavender’s partnership with TrueCommerce and the benefits of a leading EDI solution, check out their complete success story.
About the Author: Brian Lindner is the Director of Field Marketing at TrueCommerce. He has spent the last 15 years in B2B project management and marketing. His focus is on Vendor Managed Inventory and related eCommerce solutions that help companies save time through automation. Brian enjoys spending time with his wife and 2 kids and in his spare time brews delicious craft beer with his friends.
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