Tewksbury, MA January 21, 2002 School Specialty Inc., the largest U.S. direct marketer of supplemental educational supplies, is set to manage orders, inventory and distribution across its extended supply chain using software licensed from solution provider Yantra.
School Specialty markets supplemental educational supplies to schools and teachers using a variety of online, catalog and direct sales channels. The company has acquired 38 companies over the last 10 years and exceeds $800 million dollars in annual revenue.
The company will deploy Yantra's Multi-Enterprise Order, Inventory, Catalog, Delivery and Warehouse management applications to provide a single platform for coordinating, managing and monitoring sales orders across all its divisions, channels and suppliers.
With the Yantra solution, School Specialty will automate order capture and management across its multiple channels and divisions while allocating and shipping from the most cost-effective point in its extended distribution network. This includes eight distribution centers and 500 drop-ship suppliers. All sales orders, both cross-channel and divisional, will be managed in the Yantra applications based on user-defined business rules and appropriate sourcing and fulfillment paths. The software also provides School Specialty with the foundation to add new order capture points so that new channels and acquisitions can be assimilated while maintaining each new entity's or product's unique order processing rules.
School Specialty will also deploy Yantra's warehouse management software, DCS, in three of its distribution centers initially. DCS will enable the company to allocate product to customer orders based on inbound as well as in-stock inventory. It includes a work-in-process capability that School Specialty will use for build-to-order and build-to-stock products. DCS also provides outbound shipment management capabilities.
"We are aggressively pursuing a new strategic business model to drive significant improvement in customer order fulfillment while reducing process costs across our extended supply chain," said Brent Pulsipher, executive vice president for corporate logistics and technology at School Specialty. "Yantra's existing capabilities and future direction are well-suited to enable us to achieve both our short- and long-term business goals."
