To businesses, Lands’ End is known for its tailored and business-casual logoed apparel for office wear, trade shows, company events and more. But “uniform” doesn’t mean identical; not every one of its business customers’ thousands and thousands of employees fit off-the-rack sizes. Whatever the employee’s needs, the uniforms and apparel from Lands’ End have to fit and look great on them to ensure companies’ brands are represented properly. That calls for Lands’ End to handle individual custom orders as quickly and reliably as it handles standard orders. Keeping corporate customers satisfied depends on it.
The company’s custom order process has historically been manual, with instructions for special orders being communicated around Lands’ End and outside the company to international suppliers and the customers themselves, all via email and phone. That adds up to a six-to-eight-week process to deliver customers’ orders and, when the order isn’t quite right, starting over: 100% rework, 100% more cost, and a 100% delay.
To reduce that time and cost, Lands’ End looked at automating much of the work with an expensive business process automation solution — until the company saw it would only be trading one set of costs for another. Instead, it turned to Nintex and Nintex solution provider Boost Strategy Partners.
Special orders need special care
Together, Lands’ End and Boost used Nintex Workflow and Nintex Forms for SharePoint and Nintex Workflow Cloud, along with Six Sigma principles, for a revamped, streamlined, end-to-end process that’s faster, more accurate, and more cost-effective.
Now, when a customer calls the Lands’ End service center with a special order the Customer Care Consultant records the customer’s order using Nintex Forms, which kicks off the transmission of a custom order sizing form to the customer via Nintex Workflow Cloud. The completed form is sent back to Lands’ End, approved by staff, and routed, again via Nintex, to a vendor for manufacturing, along with a due date assigned by the solution. The vendor sends the completed order to Lands’ End, which approves it and sends it to the customer. Every step of the process is time stamped so it can be monitored and analyzed.
Lands’ End’s most crucial KPIs—time-to-benefit, productivity, and accuracy—have all improved, thanks to the solution. “Nintex has a tremendous impact on Lands’ End,” says Zach Munns, Senior Project Manager at Lands’ End. “In the new world of work, it’s more important than ever for us to operate with a lean model. It’s imperative to work smarter, not harder, and that’s what Nintex helps us to do.”
Encouraged by their success, Lands’ End has gone on to deploy more than 80 Nintex-based solutions across the enterprise. Each project returns an average 120% ROI in efficiency gains.
