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Case Study: Automated Order Fulfillment and Inventory Management Application

In the early fall of 2003, Great Lakes Scrip Center (GLSC) had experienced tremendous growth throughout the year. As they approached their peak business period, the holiday shopping season, they understood that their current systems and processes would not be sufficient to meet their service guarantees.

After conducting a time study of their order fulfillment process, GLSC contacted Clearpoint Consulting to design, implement, and deploy an automated order fulfillment and inventory tracking system.

The identified goals for the new application were:

  • Reduce the average time to fulfill an order for shipment by 40% or more.
  • Improve GLSC’s ability to track their inventory from receipt from their supplier, to assignment to a customer’s order.
  • Reduce fulfillment errors by incorporating a variety of system checks.
  • Tighten their inventory controls to reduce stock loss.


    • After several days of consultations and design sessions, we had the outlines for a multiple-phase release. After three weeks of development, the first release was installed on a limited portion of production. By the end of the original six-week schedule, several incremental releases had been produced well ahead of schedule.

    After six weeks of development, GLSC began to realize the benefits of the solution which include:
  • Reducing the average time to pick and prepare an order for shipment by 50%.
  • Reduction of picking-related service incidents being reported even as the order volume dramatically increased over the periods used for comparison.
  • Physical inventory was easier to perform and inventory control was improved

    • "Clearpoint Consulting has become an indispensable part of our team," said Dave Burgess, GLSC Vice President. "Clearpoint understands our business and they deliver easy-to-use technology solutions that improve our bottom line."