Snapfulfil drives dramatic improvements for action sports retailer

Freestyle Xtreme sells the biggest brands in action sports and operates 20 multi-country, multi-lingual websites, regularly shipping to 60+ countries worldwide.

The company’s 15,000 sq ft warehouse in Bristol stocks around 30,000 SKUs and 100,000 items and typically handles in the region of 800 orders per day, a figure which can more than double in the run up to Christmas peak.

Having grown sales by more than 100% in 12 months, Freestyle Xtreme found that the warehouse management module of its ERP system lacked both the functionality and flexibility it needed to manage its fast-moving and fast-growing fulfilment operation.

The business therefore set out to find a best of breed WMS to provide a stable and scalable platform for continued growth and to support its crucial peak trading periods.

Following a review of several WMS vendors, Freestyle Xtreme selected the Snapfulfil Cloud WMS due to its feature rich solution, No Capex business model and the immediate productivity improvements made possible by the system’s automated task management functionality.

As a result, the operation is now handling 108% more volume with only 40% more people, working an eight hour day, rather than the previous need for 12 hour shifts.

Freestyle Xtreme has also seen a substantial reduction in sending errors from around 0.4% to 0.06%.

FreestyleXtreme’s Customer Experience Director, Ben Richardson says: “Snapfulfil has all but removed human error from the operation and gives us complete visibility of every action. As a result, if we do experience a problem, we’re able to identify the exact cause and to modify our processes accordingly, driving continuous improvement.”

In conjunction with a new multi-level picking system, the efficiencies driven by Snapfulfil are also expected to allow Freestyle Xtreme to delay moving to a larger warehouse for at least three years, avoiding the associated cost and disruption.