Intelligentsia is a nationally recognized specialty coffee producer headquartered in Chicago. The company operates a multi-channel model, selling to direct & distribution wholesale, retail, and e-commerce customers. As the company grew, and took on a significant strategic investment, it was clear that its current ERP was no longer up to the task. In order to meet operational, reporting, and growth objectives, a new, more modern, system was required. Oracle NetSuite was selected.
With the Oracle NetSuite implementation complete, and new workflows established, attention turned to shipping. Oracle NetSuite had provided automation in all key financial and accounting areas, but certain aspects of fulfillment, most notably matching shipping lists and labels, were still bottlenecks. The company’s wholesale and e-commerce were dependent on the ability to fulfill, but there literally were not enough hours in the day. Fortunately, its Oracle NetSuite implementation partner recommended Pacejet.
Growth is far more achievable when you gain 1-2 hours of fulfillment time every day, which is exactly what happened. The ability to print labels and packing lists on the same sheet eliminated the process of manually checking one against the other. Pacejet’s pick-pack-ship automation further removed the need to devote an employee to selecting the right boxes for each order by hand.
Intelligentsia is a roast-to-order coffee company, and ideally, no bags of coffee are left in the warehouse at day’s end. However, the final carrier pick-up is always 7:00 PM and orders not packed and labeled do not make it out that day. The 1-2 hours per day saved with Pacejet dramatically improved the daily throughput. The company reduced by 80% the number of days it missed daily shipment targets, with an error rate below 1%!
In retrospect, meeting last year’s increase in e-commerce volume would not have been possible without Pacejet eliminating the lingering fulfillment bottlenecks. Now, instead of merely keeping up with current demand, Intelligentsia feels confident it has the software infrastructure to support continued growth in the coming years. This allows the company to focus its efforts on additional innovations in the specialty coffee space (and meet the associated demand).
The company has recently launched new lines of ready-to-drink and instant products in addition to its core lineup. Expanding, while maintaining Intelligentsia’s unmatched reputation for quality and consistency was no small undertaking. Developing such products worthy of the Intelligentsia name was only part of the challenge. Expanding the capacity to distribute, and add a significant number of SKUs, required the right technology.
Intelligentsia’s growth with Pacejet has only just begun. With its parcel shipping workflows established, there is an opportunity to address another manual process: Freight shipping. As a leading provider of shipping execution across modes (parcel, truckload, and LTL), Pacejet is an ideal partner to begin automation of non-parcel shipping. Pacejet will further help Intelligentsia take on new national accounts, in areas like home meal delivery, with complete confidence not only in its product, but its distribution.
Not every specialty producer is able to maintain Intelligentsia’s level of reliability as it grows and expands, often due to the complexities that growth creates for shipping products to wholesalers, retailers, and consumers. Thanks to developing superior processes, around purpose-built software, Intelligentsia’s reputation for excellence remains intact across its entire, and rapidly growing, customer base.
“Growth, for us, means getting more new products to market, and more of those products in our customers’ hands. But, just as we’d never sacrifice the quality of our coffee for the sake of selling more, neither would we sacrifice our customer experience, which requires timely, accurate shipping. And that means technology that can keep up. With Pacejet, we can spend more of the day actually fulfilling orders, hit more of our targets, and practically eliminate order errors. It’s been an operational game changer.”