Fit & Fast: Titan Brands’ Adoption of Tech Accelerates Supply Chain Efficiency

Online retailer Titan Brands is one of the 30 fastest-growing e-commerce retailers in the U.S. Offering products under the Titan Fitness, Titan Attachments, and Ash & Ember brands, the company is not anticipating that growth slowing in the near future.

But to meet its ambitious targets, Titan needed a comprehensive solution that allowed it to succeed at the “order-to-ship cycle” where customer orders were fulfilled in hours rather than days. To do that, the $200-million-plus revenue company required real-time inventory visibility, accurate delivery timelines, and insight into shipping costs at the time the customer order is placed.

Jeff Hill, senior director of supply chain for Titan Brands joined Körber Supply Chain Software VP of Sales Craig Moore for a case study presentation at last month’s National Retail Federation Big Show in New York City. To address these challenges, Titan implemented Körber’s order management system (OMS), customer care and customer experience platforms, and product information management (PMI) system, all of which comprise the Körber Enspire Commerce platform. Titan also implemented Körber’s warehouse management system (WMS).

During the presentation, Hill and Moore highlighted the opportunities Titan hoped to address. These included meeting heightened demand for its D2C and marketplace (Amazon, Walmart, eBay) channels, improvement to real-time inventory information, increased delivery data accuracy while lowering freight costs, and reducing the order-to-ship cycle time.

The Enspire Commerce platform offered Titan the following capabilities:

Enabled order allocation for least-cost fulfillment DC selection and least-cost carrier selection
Provided the ability to allocate inventory that was in transit from APAC so inventory could be sold before it arrived in the U.S.
Created flexible, made-to-order kitting for inventory to be shipped from multiple warehouses, enabling inventory to be shipped as either a component or kit
Put infrastructure in place to support strategic growth with a scalable system in the cloud
Provided the ability to give estimated delivery times in the website shopping cart for a better customer experience
Created the ability for customers to select expedited shipping options
Implemented configurable systems versus requiring customizations

The implementations resulted in the improvement in inventory information, increased delivery date accuracy, decreased freight costs, and a reduction in errors in customer service, warehouse, and finance, the company noted in a related case study.

In a separate interview with Supply Chain Management Review, Rik Schrader, senior vice president of sales and alliances for Körber Supply Chain, said part of the success of Titan and businesses like it relies in the digitization of the supply chain.

“There is a generational shift occurring in the marketplace,” he said, asking whether “[if] warehouses that are not automated in a good place to keep hiring.”

In the case of Titan, it was also about the customer and who that customer was—the warehouse, retailer or consumer.

“It’s really important today [to answer] what is my promise and deliverables,” Schrader said. “How well did you serve me? With Titan, it was who are they serving?”

Titan needed a more mature infrastructure, Schrader added, so it could serve these multiple channels. Putting in a system that offers both OMS and WMS capabilities enables a “single source of truth” which becomes “a good go-to-market strategy,” he said.