JustFoodForDogs is a nutrition-first dog food retailer that manufactures nourishing products designed to promote overall pet health and longevity. They are hyper focused on the quality of their food, providing customers with “the best food in the world for your dog.” Leading the fulfillment team at JustFoodForDogs, Harry Hartman was responsible for overseeing the company’s direct-to-consumer fulfillment team, which means managing their 3PL network, understanding their inventory locations and levels, and executing seamless product delivery to customers. He has since transitioned to managing the team’s B2B operation, delivering to retail partners.
Use Case: Automated Inventory Reporting
Problem Statement
For a dog food retailer, manual inventory reporting process became a limiting factor with the increase in store locations and additional channels, leading to a laborious process of inventory consolidation for the fulfillment teams.
Realization Approach
With a streamlined data workflow that blends multiple sources, the retailer was able to build inventory consolidation reporting, with additional dashboards for advisory and forecasting, which further helped them to monitor the in and out stock quantities to make efficient purchase decisions.
Solution Space
This solution has a multi fold positive impact on the fulfillment team’s efforts (by saving 64 hours each month), additional revenues (in tune of $7 Million), and has helped the company unlock newer sales channels to pursue growth.
As demand for JustFoodForDogs grew across multiple retail channels, scaling the operation came with a host of data challenges. Hartman was in search of a flexible data tool that could automate and improve a range of operational processes. Parabola fit the bill.
The Challenge with Automated Inventory Reporting
While the team at JustFoodForDogs was excited that order volume was steadily growing, monitoring inventory levels became increasingly difficult as the business scaled. The fulfillment team was manually completing a 58 page SOP that would take 8 hours to complete just to get an up-to-date count of their inventory levels. This highly manual, laborious process left plenty of room for human error: It required cleaning and matching data from 20+ inventory locations including production facilities, fulfillment centers, and bulk storage locations.
With such a manual inventory reporting process, errors were inevitable; which at best meant unnecessarily ordering and producing materials, and at worst, resulted in stockouts that directly impacted customers. “We were making the manual way of tracking inventory work for as long as we could, but once we started to see an uptick in calls at our customer support center, the alarm bells went off,” Hartman explained.
To make matters worse, the reporting process was so manual and convoluted that only one Inventory Specialist, Joseph Oca, knew how to run it. Hartman shared that, “There was only one person who knew how to get the data output we needed, which meant he couldn’t take PTO without impacting the entire company. The process was not scalable for our team.”
The fulfillment team also needed to get their spend under control. “We were doing everything we could to deliver a positive customer experience which often meant expediting shipments or over-purchasing products. It got really expensive,” Hartman said. With a vast majority of their products requiring refrigeration to stay fresh, the team was over-purchasing dry ice to make sure they never ran out.
Without accurate forecasts, they were stuck paying for expensive storage and wasted products. While their workarounds often solved the customer impact issue, they created unwieldy expenses that made it hard to plan a fulfillment budget and pursue additional sales channels.
The Solution : Automated Data Pipeline
After a careful review process, the team at JustFoodForDogs chose Parabola to introduce automation to their fulfillment processes.
They have built workflows that seamlessly blend rows of data from multiple sources: WMS data from their 3PLs, purchase order details from Netsuite, a demand forecast from the planning team, QC inventory data from the quality control team…the list goes on. By integrating data from their co-manufacturers and 3PL partners with pertinent information from different internal teams, they successfully automated inventory consolidation reporting.
Oca, the employee previously responsible for the tedious reporting process, was a fast learner—and he was excited to automate the entire process using Parabola. He created an Inventory Advisory workflow that outlined average weeks of supply, total weeks of supply, and compared that data to order status.
And to address forecasting needs, they created an Ecommerce Dashboard, which allowed them to monitor volumes of dry ice and perishable food products in stock, and determine when to purchase more and how much to purchase.
The team was initially concerned that it would take them months to learn how to use Parabola, but they quickly became expert builders.Their only regret? That they didn’t implement Parabola sooner.
The Result
Since implementing Parabola, the fulfillment team at JustFoodForDogs is finally able to contribute meaningfully to revenue growth. They calculate that Parabola has helped them fill close to $7 million in additional revenue they ship out each year.
With Parabola, the team has automated fill rate reporting and increased fill rate at their largest retail partners by 15% to an impressive 98%. That 15% increase in fill rate correlates to an additional $130K in revenue they can ship out each week without having to hire additional team members.
Additionally, the increase in fill rate has allowed the team to confidently pursue new sales channels without growing headcount. Hartman shared: “Automating inventory management in Parabola has been a huge unlock for growing our business, we can finally keep up with demand and plan for future growth.”
The fulfillment team at JustFoodForDogs is feeling much better about scope since Parabola has been implemented, saving 64 hours each month on the inventory consolidation report alone. They now have over 120 workflows running in Parabola for different use cases, and the majority of their operations team is in Parabola each week.
This post was originally published in Parabola
