Customers

Case Study - Start-rite

Start-rite is the UK’s oldest shoe company, established in 1792 by cordwainer James Smith at Norwich market. Today, the company has a turnover of over £25 million, employs 110 people and has nearly 1,100 different shoe lines serving children from age two to early teens. Start-rite is one the oldest and most respected shoes brands in Britain; the company is independent and after two and a quarter centuries, is still run by descendants of the family that founded it. Specialists in high quality fitted children’s shoes, Start-rite was the first company to make shoes in half-sizes and width fittings for growing feet and the first children’s shoemaker to receive a Royal Warrant.

 

The 21st century Start-rite is a wholesale business whose famous branded footwear is stocked by a range of well-known High Street outlets such as John Lewis, Russell & Bromley, A Jones and Clinkards in Scotland. Pulling out of the retail market in 2004, Start-rite reflects the recent significant changes that have occurred in the home market. While design, engineering and quality control functions remain in the UK, Start-rite has switched from traditional domestic manufacturing to sourcing product from key suppliers in Europe and India.

PrimaNet wears it well for Start-rite Shoes

Start-rite’s decision to make fundamental and required changes to its business model also meant new premises and the opportunity to introduce a cutting edge IT infrastructure that would underpin the revised commercial strategy. The company’s new Norwich facility would become a centre of excellence, controlling the design, development, buying, import and then distribution of completely finished products.

Underpinning this capability is PrimaNet, the modular, enterprise-wide business solution developed specifically for the clothing and footwear industry by Loughborough-based Prima Solutions. PrimaNet is the key component of Start-rite’s operations, providing the flexible and responsive platform needed for running a lean, service-oriented and international business. The result? A nimbler business with on-demand management information, very efficient automated processes, precision planning, lower costs and improved profitability.

Price Pressure

The key business issue facing modern shoe manufacturers is price. The need for more cost-effective manufacturing has driven a collective switch to overseas-sourced components and semi-finished footwear.

The ability to thrive under such circumstances and maintain brand integrity requires flexibility, responsive processes and clear, real-time operational vision across the entire business. On top of this, Start-rite also faced very tough competition from its major – and bigger - competitor in the UK market: Clarks.

Start-rite’s approach was to source fully-resourced, boxed and ready-to-go footwear imported from India and the Far East, while keeping design, quality control, engineering and distribution operations hubbed out of the new Norwich facility – a rare and bold combination. Representing a complete revolution to the company’s established ways of working, the new strategy would do away with all but minor UK finishing and concentrate on creating a fast-moving supply chain that would get the right products, in the right quantities to the right people, in the right place at the right time – every time.

A new IT backbone

The key to unlocking the benefits of the new business model was the technology backbone that underpinned it. A bespoke mainframe-based system developed over many years meant that stock control and order processing was driven by IT considerations rather than by business need. Sales data would become less accurate throughout each business day and a mix of manual design, manual and automated order taking using the ‘punch verify’ system kept the IT at arms length from the business front line.

David Smith is Start-rite’s IT Manager: “Ultimately we found that the existing IT systems were constraining the business – in terms of effectiveness, cost and usability – creating the feeling that we were falling behind the competition despite the recognised high quality of the footwear we were selling. Coupled with the way that the domestic market was changing, we saw this as the ideal opportunity to make some profoundly positive changes to our infrastructure that would put Start-rite at the cutting edge of 21st century shoe manufacturing."

“Critical to performance of the business were the product range, the buying decisions and stock allocation decisions. This meant we needed an integrated, easy-to-use IT solution that could bring together management information, product development, sales forecasting, purchase planning and stock allocation under one roof. After a four-way tender, we were convinced that PrimaNet was the right option – not just to take us through a period of extraordinary change but to deliver a rock-solid, proven platform for the business that would give us the flexibility we sought for the future.”

PrimaNet is Windows-based, operates across Start-rite’s LAN and is available on 80 workstations plus four dedicated users in quality control and seven in the warehouse.

“It wasn’t just down to the capabilities of the system – Prima’s expertise in the shoe market gives them an intimate knowledge of the issues we face. Their willingness to challenge assumptions – as well as us – has made for a stronger solution. The relationship with Prima is one of strategic partnership and we take it as seriously as we do the relationships with our manufacturers.”

Smoothing out the rough spots

The market for children’s footwear is notoriously peaky: the back-to-school rush in September places terrific pressure on the business during July and August when order and delivery throughputs typically quadruple. Additional mid-season range refreshes in winter and spring plus daily stock-top ups to retail customers means that exceptional planning accuracy is needed.

Continues Smith: “Working with the old system meant we would get any where up to three to four days behind on orders. With PrimaNet, we now typically get around four days ahead of schedule on all orders because the system lets us control picking and despatch in advance. This capability is critical when planning for September. We can be processing anything up to 12,000 pairs of shoes per day from our 29,000 SKUs in the warehouse. If there is a more efficient way to satisfy an order, PrimaNet will automatically suggest alternatives. The solution’s precision automatic stock control means our retail customers have total confidence that the right product will be available to them in the right amounts when they need it most.”

PrimaNet has EPOS connectivity down the supply chain and enables Start-rite to down or up the stock against anticipated purchase patterns. This ensures next-day replenishment to its retail customers and is a new PrimaNet module developed specifically for Start-rite. It is also one that Smith says gives management an exceptional, near real-time view of the rhythms of the business.

Benefits across the board

The impact of PrimaNet is not just limited to managing existing day-to-day operations. It has also enabled Start-rite to explore the potential efficiencies of extending the supply chain across the Internet. With an eCommerce capability built into PrimaNet, 30 retail customers already regularly place their orders online and a further 110 are going down the Internet procurement route. This is particularly helpful for Start-rite’s customers in Ireland where the cost of automated, error-free and self-service online ordering is much cheaper – and more accurate - than a phone call.

Smith is delighted with the results: “The difference PrimaNet has made to our business is colossal. We have a truly international supply chain that feeds our UK customers with product from India, China, Vietnam and Thailand. PrimaNet has smoothed out the spikes and dips and means the warehouse is always on top of or ahead of the order book. This in turn gives us the freedom and the scalable resource to plan growth and take a much longer-term view of where we’re going.

“We can easily interrogate live data to identify trends and model ‘what if?’ scenarios. Thanks to its exceptional reliability, we have been able to make significant improvements to customer service and year on year we are taking more orders through a smaller and more efficient operation. It’s no exaggeration to say that without PrimaNet, we couldn’t have reinvented the business in the way we have.”