Rawlings Sporting Goods Scores Big with Cloud Document Management

Rawlings Sporting Goods implemented DocuWare Cloud to improve information sharing and communication with its vendors worldwide. Since implementing this cloud document management solution, the company sped up its production through business process automation, raised the quality of customer interactions, and improved customer service and vendor relations.

Rawlings Sporting Goods Company, Inc., established in 1887 and based in St. Louis, Missouri, is a leading manufacturer and marketer of sporting goods in the United States. They focus on developing and producing innovative, high-performance equipment and protective apparel for the professional, amateur and entry-level player. Known for their quality baseball equipment, the company also makes softballs, footballs and basketballs, as well as operating a robust custom uniform business. Rawlings sells direct to end-consumers through retail stores, schools, leagues and booster organizations.

Requirements

The Rawlings customer service team works with clients to create custom products such as apparel, uniforms, sporting equipment and other licensed items. With so much information to manage for each order, Rawlings found it challenging to tie custom specifications and artwork back to the original order and effectively communicate this information to their vendors. Finding a solution that allowed document and file sharing with vendors across the globe while maintaining version control became business critical.

One of Rawlings’ Vice Presidents watched a DocuWare demonstration and was impressed to find a powerful and flexible document management Cloud solution. He asked his IT team to evaluate the product to see if their ERP data could be integrated with DocuWare to help them manage important information in one system.

Solution

Rawlings’ IT department approved DocuWare for their solution. Now that DocuWare Cloud is in place, Rawlings can easily share artwork, approvals and ordering information with their vendors. They invited their vendors as external collaborators into DocuWare Cloud and simply provided each one with a login and password.

Rawlings focused on using DocuWare for the piece of the process between order entry and artwork approval. For Rawlings, custom artwork and specifications are treated as raw materials because they are essential to create the custom goods.

Order information is pushed from Rawlings’ ERP system into DocuWare and used as an index term. The staff then uses DocuWare to create a sequential project number which is also used to index the order. Digitized art files, art approval forms, photos, notes and ordering information is all indexed and stored in DocuWare. A workflow between the sales rep and customer service department is in place to alert the customer service team if order approval has not occurred. Once the art has been approved and the order is finalized, the customer service rep will add the supplier number to the order, allowing the supplier to access the order and start production.  Each supplier simply logs into DocuWare and has immediate access to everything they need to customize an order.

Benefits

DocuWare helps improve the quality and accuracy of each customer order by giving vendors self-serve access to only the final artwork and relevant customer notes, eliminating confusion and potential delays. Rawlings’ purchasing department works with vendors to make sure they have enough raw materials for each order.  Due to short lead times for playoff games and materials constraints, Rawlings often splits one order between two suppliers.  Items need to be identical and with DocuWare in place, the company is able to give each supplier access to the information to make that happen.

A photo of each team’s finished uniform is added to DocuWare before shipping to the customer. If a customer calls with a question or complaint about a uniform, the customer service rep can quickly access an image of the uniform and have a better, faster conversation with the customer instead of reading art placement descriptions. The adage “a picture is worth a thousand words” is true for Rawlings.

“The information in DocuWare raises the quality of our customer interaction and allows us to respond faster,” said Sally Vandegrift Yeast, Vice President of Customer Experience & Analytics for Rawlings.

Rawlings does a lot of repeat business, so when a team orders a few more uniforms for their new players they absolutely must match the existing uniforms. It is essential that the correct information be readily accessible. With DocuWare in place, the vendors have immediate access to the artwork used for each order.

“The relationship with our vendors has improved because we now have a consistent and reliable way to communicate order information. We’ve found that better vendor relationships supports better customer service,” said Yeast.

Having great success after their initial use of DocuWare, Rawlings began to expand their use of in the solution in creative ways. For example, when a new customer calls to order a uniform, the customer service team can quickly do a search in DocuWare and pull up several examples of other orders with a similar logo. Being able to share art mock ups of different versions really helps new customers see what they want or don’t want when ordering their own uniform.

“It was hard to imagine all the benefits we gained by moving to DocuWare, until we implemented the solution. I can’t tell you how much help it so to be able to search for information in more than one way,” exclaimed Yeast.

Conclusion

DocuWare’s fulltext search feature is helping Rawlings’ sales force embrace the new solution. The sales team has quickly learned how easy it is to find an order — even searching a unique player name can help them find the order they need. DocuWare is now expanding to the engineering division and the company is working to store technical documents and product specifications in DocuWare.

“The ultimate impact of implementing DocuWare is that it has sped up our business and production processes and raised customer satisfaction. Uniforms, season and special games are time sensitive. You don’t get a second chance to deliver goods on time,” said Yeast.

 “The relationship with our vendors has improved because we now have a consistent and reliable way to communicate order information.  We’ve found that better vendor relationships support better customer service.”

Sally Vandegrift Yeast

Vice President, Customer Experience & Analytics

Rawlings Sporting Goods Company, Inc.