Based in Cumberland, Wisconsin, USA, Ardisam is an employee-owned company that manufactures seasonal outdoor equipment for customers worldwide.
They are best known for ice fishing gear but offer everything from pellet stoves and chicken pluckers to yard tools, tents and hunting blinds. All of these can be found on Ardisam’s websites and at major retailers, such as Menards and Amazon.
Building a Faster Shipping Process
Black Friday weekend is one of the most monumental sales periods, and it means all hands on deck. However, the large spike in shipping volume can also reveal weaknesses in operational processes.
All of Ardisam’s corporate and seasonal employees are invited into the warehouses to help fulfill the high volume of orders. Although this help is essential, it means some people are less familiar with the warehouse than others. Ardisam’s operations must be straightforward and easy to explain to these newcomers for ultimate success during this period.
An optimized, efficient warehouse is crucial to ensuring smooth operations and zero order-fulfillment errors, also known as mis-ships.
After the 2024 Black Friday weekend, Brian Nelson, Process Improvement and Inventory Manager, noticed that Ardisam was incurring costly fees and a high volume of mis-ships. He observed and analyzed warehouse operations, identifying ways to improve order fulfillment and calculate dim weight.
Thinking Outside the Box
When orders came in, forklifts and individual team members would constantly go back and forth between stock locations and the packing station to select and package products.
The team would use Ardisam’s ERP system to find each product’s weight and dimensions, using them to calculate shipping costs and classify parcels. Due to packaging materials, the dimensional weight data in the ERP system was not always accurate compared with the actual shipping weights. This led to substantial fees for incorrect dimensional weight data.
As more shipping carriers switched to dimensional weight for shipping rates, Nelson knew Ardisam could not rely on ERP weights and dimensions for dim weight.
