THE CHALLENGE
| COMPANY PROFILE In 2005, Crane USA started with a few product designs and continued to grow each year since then, working towards solving consumers’ indoor product needs. Crane products are continually designed with efficiency, functionality and style in mind. They provide a range of items including: humidifiers, space heaters, air purifiers and fans. |
| “I didn’t have to buy a huge application and spend hundreds of thousands of dollars, so DiOMS really fits our budget and can fit anyone’s budget. It can grow with your business and use all of the data to optimize your processes.” -Dirk Niedermann, Crane USA President |
Crane USA originated from humble beginnings, starting with a manual order management process and a handful of retailers. With the addition of new products and consistent growth, Crane recognized that it would soon become too challenging to manually process such a heavy volume of orders and keep up with the increasing demands of their partners. Dirk Niedermann, Crane USA founder, partnered with LeSaint Logistics to find a solution. With the additional guidance of Jim Savage of Savage and Associates Consulting, Dirk chose DiCentral to scale their EDI. This mosaic of talent became a dream team to catapult Crane to the next level.
SCALING SOLUTIONS TO GROWTH
Within three years of fully sourcing their EDI needs from DiCentral, Crane’s client base has drastically increased to serve more than 400 retail partners. Over time, DiCentral and LeSaint needed to make the needed customizations to map Crane’s retail partners into their EDI platform. This process involved automating the flow of orders from the order management system into QuickBooks. DiCentral and LeSaint established a working partnership and a solution for Crane that gave them the power to control the release of product orders to either their LA or Chicago warehouses through the order management system.
THE SOLUTION
Today, Crane has complete visibility into their inventory of 100 products with 400 trading partners worldwide. Crane now seamlessly exchanges data through DiCentral’s EDI solution and order management system integrated with LeSaint’s 3PL warehouse support. The demand forecast module of the DiCentral order management system gives Crane more accuracy with forecasting and enables them to budget wisely with real-time status updates on inventory. This tool analyzes sales from previous years and forecasts for upcoming automated inventory replenishment. The processes and capabilities of the system close the loops on order management and grant Crane the transaction capacity of a bigger organization.
