New Balance: Shoe Fits - ' Hitting the Limit '
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Hitting the Limit
To jump-start that accountability, Holland brought Kris Vandemore, the sales
coordinator for the West Coast office, along with her to the SRC users conference
in Anaheim that February. She then guided Vandemore through the process of building
reports in SRC's software.
But there was a major hurdle to giving Vandemore and other employees in remote
offices full access to the data in SRC—bandwidth. The SRC server for sales
forecasting was located in the Boston headquarters, and SRC's client software
used to create reports requires a direct connection to that database. That made
using the software over the wide-area network connection back to Boston painfully
slow from Vandemore's California office.
To solve the problem, Holland made the client software available through a Citrix
terminal server. That allowed remote employees to build their own reports from
the forecast data on a computer with a high-speed connection to the database
and SRC application server; they could then send workbooks based on those report
formats to the regional sales managers and others by e-mail.
Lack of bandwidth created other problems. Typically, sales reps were being sent
three forecasts to update—one for major accounts, one for small retailers
and one for New Balance company stores in their territories. To help prepare
the forecasts, 15 megabytes of data were being sent out to each sales rep.
That exceeded the limits set in New Balance's e-mail system for the amount of
data that could be sent in and out of each mailbox. Holland was affected, too.
As she started to send out the files to more and more salespeople, she exceeded
the storage quota of her e-mail account.
Meanwhile, the sales reps were going nuts. They had slow connections. "I would
e-mail these workbooks as attachments to salespeople," she says, "and they would
just clog up their e-mail. They might be trying to send out an order, might
be trying to get through to a customer, and they would freak out because it
took an hour to download their mail."
SRC solved the problem with a Web check-out system. Sales reps now download
forecast workbooks at their convenience. When they're ready to report in, reps
check off the forecasts that have been completed, and the correct workbook files
are automatically uploaded for collection, slicing and dicing by "master users"
such as Holland and Vandemore.
The result is a much more accurate picture each month of what New Balance's
future looks like. Since New Balance has a six-month lead time for delivery
from its factories and overseas suppliers, shaving a month from the time it
takes to react to changing customer sentiment is huge. Sean O'Brien, product
manager for New Balance's cross trainer, basketball and tennis lines, estimates
that he's been able to improve his capacity planning by 25%.
That translates to more efficient production. Sales-planning chief Stan Mescon
says that since the implementation of SRC the number of shoes left in inventory
when New Balance discontinues a style has dropped on average by about 8%.
It also means New Balance can react more quickly to retailers' needs, a quality
that chains such as Foot Locker and The Sports Authority say has been the single-largest
reason it has been taking market share from Nike.
New Balance's ability to ship orders to its retailers, on time and complete,
has "gone up between 5% and 10%" per retailer, says Mescon. That means fewer
back orders, a smoother management of inventory by retailers, and more shoes
on customers' feet.
Projects: Management 
