Madison Park Greetings (MPG) manufactures, distributes, and designs fine
gift and stationery products from its facility in Seattle, Washington.
"Madison Park Greetings has its own product line and we establish partnerships with artists to manufacture and distribute their creations," explained Brian Jacobsen, MPG Co-President. "This allows the artist to focus on product development and design while we handle all operations including customer service, manufacturing, warehousing, inventory control, credit, and fulfillment. We distribute 17,000 SKUs to 8,000 retail accounts using an independent sales force of 300 representatives throughout the country."
The partnering concept came to fruition in the mid-90's as MPG wasn't growing beyond $2.5 million. "We wanted to establish long-term relationships with the industry's top brands and designers. By leveraging our infrastructure, we've been able to incrementally increase sales by adding partners and we're now over ten million in annual sales," said Brian.
After using limiting, industry-specific database software, Brian sought software that could grow with this unique business.
Each partner company is branded distinctly and run as its own business unit within MPG. This means separate toll-free telephone numbers, catalogs, personalized shipping labels, and prior to Navision, preprinted invoice forms for each partner.
"Our previous software was cumbersome in dealing with all the options of scheduling and coordinating orders. There was chaos prior to Navision!"
"We needed a flexible system to handle our unique needs and Navision was it," continued Brian. "We can now produce exactly what needs to ship. Our bread and butter is a ton of little orders to mom and pop stores. Navision allows us to group these orders together. For instance, we can combine twenty-five orders into one manufacturing order."
Grouping multiple orders into one manufacturing order is cost-effective for MPG because it can take up to five vendors to make a single product. For a greeting card, there is prepress, paper, printing, and possibly die-cutting and embossing. MPG acts as the contractor buying these components, and then serves as the light manufacturer assembling these components into the finished product. Navision is able to allocate cost per square inch of the product and the process (prepress, printing, etc.), so MPG knows the true cost of each of its products, even though as many as 25 cards with differing costs are manufactured together on the same sheet of card stock.
A tally system developed in Navision enables MPG to maximize efficiency
by generating a pick list for the warehouse to grab a specified group of
orders at one time. The tally pick list can be generated by division (partner),
requested ship date, and order type. "By planning production during our slow
time, and producing exactly what needs to ship, there is no wasted labor
and we can forecast. This was done manually before with loose tallies," stated
Brian.
Navision E-Ship integrates the entire packing and shipping function within the Navision database. It compares the expected weight of the package with the actual weight thus preventing packing errors. "The validation of orders is huge. It's almost impossible to mis-ship orders now," said Brian. "We used to have someone manually check all orders for over-packing and under-packing plus two people double-checking. Those two work in production now and the one who moved to Vancouver wasn't replaced. With E-Ship, our shippers just scan the products and close the order. Before, they needed to enter all kinds of information including shipping method and credit card information."
"Navision has given us more accurate data, costing, financials, and better information to plan for the future," concluded Brian.