Fulfillment Case Study
HBO
HBO is America’s most successful premium television company, delivering two 24-hour pay television services – HBO and Cinemax – to over 40 million U.S. subscribers. Internationally, HBO programming is sold in over 150 countries worldwide.
Challenge
When the owner of the fulfillment company charged with managing HBO’s sales support program retired, he decided to close the company. This left HBO in a precarious position: they had just 90 days to identify a new fulfillment partner and physically relocate all program assets.
All Points won the business…with a scant 8 days left before the old warehouse closed. No problem! There was just the small matter of moving the sales support program assets from the old facility in Chicago to their new home in Atlanta.
Unfortunately, those assets comprised more than 5,000 unique products loaded on roughly 1,500 pallets. All Points faced the titanic challenge of shifting 75 truckloads of product over an 8-day period…which overlapped with the Thanksgiving holidays.
As the cherry on top, a new online order site needed to be built and accessible within 14 days, so the 150+ sales executives who depended on the program could place their orders.
Solution
All Points leased a 35,000 sq. ft. warehouse to serve as a logistics hub. All Points coordinated with the outgoing fulfillment company in Chicago, which loaded and dispatched 1 truck per hour, 8 hours per day, 8 consecutive days. The Atlanta logistics hub received arriving trucks continuously, where the dedicated All Points team unloaded, sorted, counted, and recorded inventory in our automated inventory management system.
Meanwhile, the All Points IT department worked tirelessly, creating and standing up a stopgap order site in 10 days. Remarkably, this temporary site worked even better than the previous order system.
Even so, as soon as the interim order site was launched All Points began design and development of a permanent replacement. A crucial requirement element was the capacity to handle virtual allocations for the entire sales team and product catalog. Products were categorized by both campaign and series, as well as their relative newness or impending expiration. Site roles and access were customized for ease of ordering: each salesperson’s streamlined view of the site included only their own product allocation and order history, while program managers retained global viewing privileges. In addition to structural design, All Points also photographed more than 1,500 items, and created custom reports for HBO’s business needs.
Impact
With access to real-time inventory information and an efficient, intuitive online order site for the sales team, HBO for the first time was able to track product movement against increased sales rates.
- All
- Fulfillment
- Kitting
- Printing
- Promo Items
- Technology
