IBC Worldwide

IBC Worldwide, a product development company that works with Fortune 100 companies, needed a way to unify its global sourcing operations, increase the capacity of its product managers and gain better insight into ongoing products. By using TradeStone's solution as a service, rather than as a stand-alone software application, IBC Worldwide was able to tap into the same robust technologies as major corporations, even as it is a much smaller player.

Before deploying TradeStone, the 10 person product-development staff at IBC handled 50 requests for quotes at any given time, each with varying complexity. The TradeStone solutions doubled their capacity, eliminating many emails, calls and faxes as well as manually entered spreadsheets. Instead information enters databases automatically from the source while collaboration between product managers, designers and manufacturers takes place online. What's more, the version tracking and audit trails that had taken time away from product managers' core jobs is now handled by the system. Now, with TradeStone giving all parties a single source of information, everyone is on the same page

Novi Footwear

More than 50 million pairs of shoes sold each year in the US, Europe and South Africa came through Novi Footwear (Far East) Pte Ltd. With a network of manufacturers stretched across Taiwan, China, Indonesia, Vietnam and Cambodia, and a complex bill of materials including soles, heels, footbeds, straps, laces and trims, all finished for a wide array of sizes and styles, maintaining quality assurance and visibility into the buying process is extraordinarily complex. Throw in multiple language translations from designer to merchant to buyer to manufacturer, as well as time zone differences and currency conversions, and collaboration seems nearly impossible.

To normalize quality assurance, language, time and currency, Novi turned to TradeStone Software and the Unified Buying Process. The global order management and sourcing solutions provide a date/time stamp on all communications and provide a collaboration history on all orders. Additionally, both the manufacturer and buyer receive time and action calendars with all the product milestones for the entire lifecycle, including the rigorous pre-production tests Novi conducts on all components to ensure correct fit. Alerts are triggered for raw material shipments, quality testing, color matching tests, component assembly, finished goods testing, plant inspections, packaging, customs clearance and shipping.

It all adds up to quality footwear that moves easily from raw material through the manufacturing plants and onto the final customers.

Regatta (Pacific Alliance)

Pacific Alliance, a product development company that works with some of the world's largest retailers, needed a better way to effectively manage its many pre-production time and action calendar events each season. Also lacking visibility into its factory production milestones, Pacific Alliance turned to TradeStone Software and the Unified Buying Process. Ultimately, Pacific Alliance aimed to improve order delivery and enable its designers and global manufacturing plants to work closely with key retail customers.

By utilizing TradeStone's solutions, Pacific Alliance better positioned itself to integrate manufacturing facilities acquired as part of its merger with DonnKenny. The company also used TradeStone to improve its work in progress (WIP) visibility at the factory level, especially in the quality assurance and quality control areas.

After going live with TradeStone, Pacific Alliance noticed an improvement in order delivery as its designers and global manufacturing plants quickly realized the advantages of working in tandem with key retail customers. It immediately saw a drop-off in inventory levels while production remained on-time.