Fishing For Simplicity

Founded in 1998, Marine Depot is an on-line supplier of high-end marine and salt aquarium equipment. The company offers top-of-the-line gear and rare products ranging from tropical coral to cleaning equipment -- items that just aren't available at the local pet store. The company has even sent a live octopus and hundreds of tons of sand to the set of the television show CSI Miami.

Without being able to interact one-on-one with customers, Web stores like Marine Depot have to rely on a strong enterprise solution that offers ease of use and functionality to both the company and more importantly the customer's clients. Marine Depot owner Ken Wong explains that there are a lot of places customers can turn to for marine supplies on the Internet and they can get a lot of information from competitors. "We need to be able to provide them that same information and process their orders perfectly," says Wong. "From their standpoint, there's no reason why an order can't go through the system and be filled right away."

A Strong Backbone

The company's popularity among aquarists is evident by a massive sales spike of roughly 10 percent to 20 percent a year since its inception. Marine Depot, however, was finding itself challenged daily by the limitations inherent in its archaic back-end infrastructure. "The marketing department was being told to slow down the marketing, because the infrastructure behind the scenes couldn't keep up with the sales growth," says Dave Hurwitz, a technology consultant working with Marine Depot. Most sales that came in from the Web site were from credit card transactions, which involved a full-time employee having to manually input 300 to 400 credit card number as orders were coming in.

Upgrading Depot

Marine Depot turned to Microsoft Business Solution's Great Plains 8.0, offering financial management with a broad set of add-on solutions to mid-market segment companies. The installed SQL Server allows end-users to optimize their analysis by simplifying the process of retrieving data and preparing it for third-party reporting applications. Any number of back-end applications can be added onto the SQL server allowing Marine Depot to fully tailor the solution to their needs.

Up and Swimming

It took approximately seven months to install the system, test the various tools available and train employees to properly use the system. "We started to build a lot of flow charts to really understand what are the business processes that we want to have happen, and then make the software follow the rules that we laid out on the flow charts," says Hurwitz.

The Microsoft solution has spiked order fulfillment to roughly 1,500 orders a day using the same number of workers. According to Marine Depot, the problem was solved using InTouch warehouse management software. This Great Plains add-on analyzes batch orders, and then groups the products to be picked based on their cubic measurements, thus maximizing the number of orders that can fit on a picking cart.

"We wanted to get a system in place that would allow us to grow," explains Wong. "It's early in the implementation, but it is starting to turn around for us [in terms of return on investment]. Right now we have 13 people in the warehouse and [Great Plains] allows us to grow substantially while still keeping those 13 people," he says.

Marine Depot also uses RockySoft, a third party inventory management system that analyzes customer demand for every single item stocked in the warehouse. "The software has recommended a way to actually lower the total amount of inventory in the system while at the same time increasing the amount of orders we can ship on the same day," Hurwitz says. Using the software, Marine Depot was able to boost the amount of same-day orders from 75 percent to approximately 96 percent in three months with less on-hand inventory. "In an E-tail environment that's like the Holy Grail -- having 100 percent fill with no inventory in stock," says Herwitz.

Growing Outward

Marine Depot has the flexibility to add other modules onto the Great Plains system from third-party software vendors. According to Wong, the company expects to expand the Great Plains solution to meet future needs and take full advantage of the additional functionality. While living creatures such as fish and coral are still sold manually (live sales account for only 10 percent of Marine Depot's business), Wong plans to update the Great Plains system to handle live orders.