Testimonial \ Liz Claiborne Footwear™

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The Company:
Liz Claiborne Footwear™

The Problem:
In 1998 Liz Claiborne Footwear™ (LCF) realized that the volume of transactions, the number of new trading partners and the complexities of handling EDI manually forced them to look at alternatives - to go to the "next level". Jeff Brown, LCF's newly hired Information Technology Director was assigned the task to develop an EDI solution. Yesterday.

LCF had previously acquired the very first release of SEWN from Jesta, a new ERP system. LCF required an EDI interface to SEWN. So, Jeff had to build EDI from scratch and have it "talk to" an untested ERP package that had never been in production anywhere.

They also needed to interface to their sophisticated in-house shipping and warehousing systems and required a robust and seamless solution. For their shipping system Liz Claiborne Footwear needed to have built-in business logic controlling special situations like the handling of reorders, pre-packs, shipping to numerous distributors within one order, etc.

• No in-house staff dedicated to EDI
• Automating all EDI related processes (in addition to document mapping and processing)
• Invoke and automate EDI business rules prior to processing EDI forms
• Completely automated and seamless interfaces to:
  • SEWN - their Oracle-based ERP system
  • Yantra - their Warehouse Management System

The Solution:
Liz Claiborne Footwear made a strategic decision to seek an outsourcing partner who had vast experience with EDI and who could build and maintain interfaces to numerous databases.

Brown had previous experience with EDI and knew exactly what to do. He called 123 EDI again. Jeff was a previous customer.

"When we purchased SEWN the package was entirely new, and no companies had yet to implement an EDI solution with them, so I needed a knowledgeable EDI partner that was QUICK, reliable and could help troubleshoot problems with SEWN," Jeff said. "I had confidence that I would soon have all of my EDI transactions processed accurately, be in compliance with our trading partners and have all the transactional data reside in SEWN - all within our aggressive 4 month target."

Brown and 123 EDI agreed on a system design. LCF appreciated the fixed price quote for potentially ongoing project with the untested SENW. 123 EDI applied their unique methodology to designing and building the interfaces very quickly. At no charge, 123 EDI built a functional prototype that interfaced to SEWN for additional data to help with compliance and with the more difficult business modeling rules. This effort assured LCF that the project would succeed, come in on time and on budget. The prototype was put into production and enhanced.

A year later Liz Claiborne Footwear asked 123 EDI to build an interface to their Warehouse Management System. That was completed very expeditiously and in just two months LCF had a seamless integration talking to their warehouse.

The Results:
"Since 1998, Liz has reduced the operational cost of EDI to a minimum, our interfaces need little or no maintenance and thanks to the data normalization techniques from 123 EDI we have been able to expedite and document some EDI related process - especially in the shipping area. These guys know EDI and databases and they get it done quickly," Brown stated. "They have become an indispensable partner to Liz and I'll use them again if I ever go elsewhere."