Case Study

Sephora receives approximately 13,000 domestic shipments annually from 200 U.S. suppliers. Prior to implementation of this program, Sephora manually audited domestic bookings for quantity and ship window compliance. Sephora managed the scheduling and routing of the domestic orders via emails with the vendors and trucking companies. The manual process was time consuming, inefficient and resulted in missed opportunities to reduce trucking expense and the number of deliveries processed by their DCs. Also, there was no systematic way to communicate and track “hot” POs in order to expedite handling of these critical orders.

Century was already providing Sephora with end-to-end shipment tracking of international shipments via our Supply Chain Optimization platform. We both agreed it would be efficient and cost-effective to utilize the same platform for managing the domestic shipments as well.

Century designed a 100% scalable portal within VMS^® for domestic vendors to request PO pick-up dates and times for their shipments. Sephora accesses the portal to monitor the pick-up requests and control the routing/scheduling of these orders. The portal benefits are many:

• Transmit EDI 204 pick-up request to the trucking company
• View EDI 214 updates from the trucking company
• Check vendor compliance quickly and easily
• Flag hot POs to ensure expedited handling
• Improve routing integrity
• Gain visibility to incoming domestic freight at the DCs
• Monitor and report on vendor performance
• Communicate key messages en masse to all vendors (i.e. weather delays, new trucking companies, etc.)

The portal is a huge time saver for Sephora.