DSI Solutions In Action
MANUFACTURING / DISTRIBUTION

Rawlings Sporting Goods

dcLINK® Fits Rawlings’ Warehouse Operations Like a Glove
The start of baseball season brings joy and hope to thousands of fans and players
across the country. But for the warehouse staff at Rawlings, a leading marketer
and manufacturer of baseball equipment and other sporting goods and the official
ball supplier to Major League Baseball®, preparing for the season brought a lot ofstress.
“If you’re a customer and you order 15 jerseys and you only get 13, you’re nothappy. You have 15 players on your team and they all need jerseys,” said Mike
Campbell, Rawlings’ Director of Distribution. “Our customer service depends on
what happens in our warehouse.”
Rawlings provides hundreds of SKUs to teams, sporting goods stores, and otherretailers. They ship full pallets to national retailers, but many customers require
mixed pallet or individual case shipments. These were difficult to fill quickly andaccurately with the company’s manual, paper-based warehouse processes.
Rawlings Sporting Goods
Company
St. Louis, Missouri, USA
http://www.rawlings.com
Challenge■■
Eliminate product handling delays
caused by manual, paper-based
warehouse operations■■
Improve labor efficiency and reduce
warehouse costs■■
Improve inventory data accuracy■■
Reduce shipping errors and improvecustomer service
Solution■■dcLINK to support bar code
data collection and real-timecommunication with JD Edwards
World and JD Edwards Warehouse
Management System■■
Motorola 9090-G handheld computerswith integrated bar code readers
Results■■
Cost-per-carton reduced from $1.16
to 61¢■■
Reduced headcount at warehouselabor, clerical, and supervisory levels■■
50% reduction in inventory write
downs■■More than 75% reduction in backorders■■
Improved customer service

Challenge“The first busy season I worked here, you could literally spend half the day looking for
product. The system said it was here, but we couldn’t find it,” said Bob Cole, WMS
Manager at Rawlings’ main distribution center, a 480,000 square foot facility with
40,000 inventory locations in Washington, Missouri. “We had a dedicated team ininventory that just searched for missing product.”
Rawlings knew sending search parties was not a good way to manage inventory, andthat it needed to change its processes to handle demand fluctuations, work more
efficiently, and raise service levels.

Solution
The company already had Oracle’s JD Edwards World in place, and needed tofind a way to connect the benefits of its powerful enterprise software to actual
operations on the warehouse floor.
Rawlings brought in its warehouse“For operations andworkers for extensive discussions
customer service,
about the limitations of current
we’ve been able to hit
operations and what information theyback-to-back homeruns
needed to do their jobs better. Thenwith the implementation
Rawlings brought in the JD Edwards
Warehouse Management Systemof dcLINK, Motorola, and(WMS). DSI’s dcLINK software brought
Oracle’s JD Edwards
it all together – by enabling barcode
WMS.”
data input into WMS and providing
Mike Campbell
real-time connectivity between the
Director of Distribution
enterprise system and workers on the
Rawlings
warehouse floor.
“dcLINK gave us the flexibility toenhance the WMS to better meet our needs. It allowed us to complete the projecton time and on budget,” said Jack Matthews, Rawlings’ Director of IT.
dcLINK provides validated integration between JD Edwards and the mobile
computers used on the warehouse floor, and has standard transaction sets toautomate essential warehouse functions including receiving, putaway, cycle
counting, picking, and shipping. dcLINK also provides a powerful tool that allows
businesses to easily tailor standard transaction sets to fit their processes.
At Rawlings, dcLINK is used starting from when goods are received at the dock,where workers with Motorola 9090-G wireless handheld computers identify
incoming shipments with a barcode scan. Using real-time integration with JD

Edwards, dcLINK matches the shipment to a purchase order or an EDI Advance Ship
Notification (ASN). Workers are then directed to take the pallet for quality control
inspection or to a putaway location. All product movements are recorded by barcode
scanning and updated in JD Edwards as the activity occurs. Rawlings relies on
dcLINK and JD Edwards to manage up to 19,000 warehouse transactions a day attheir Washington facility.
“Before, just to begin putaway you had to fill out a piece of paper, give it tosomebody, and have them process it, which could take anywhere from 15
minutes to a few hours,” said Josh Kasper, a worker in the warehouse. “It wasn’t
instant, and things got lost, misread, and misinterpreted. Now that we use mobile
computers linked to our warehouse system, we don’t have to rely on people in otherdepartments to process our work.”
Service and efficiency rose almost immediately. The results prompted the company
to investigate whether manual processes at other company warehouses would also
benefit from the automation. Because the JD Edwards infrastructure is in placeacross Rawlings’ operations, it was easy to expand the dcLINK deployment.
“I don’t think porting applications to other locations could be any smoother or fasterthan it’s been,” said Claude Tougas, Rawlings’ Systems Analyst. “It was a one or two
day job, and the thing was done.”

Results
One of Rawlings’ most important warehouse performance metrics is its cost-percarton, which includes all the variable labor costs incurred while preparing a carton
for shipment to the customer. Since implementing dcLINK and JD Edwards WMS,
Rawlings has reduced its cost-per-carton from $1.16
Year
Cost-per-carton
to 61¢, a 47 percent reduction. The cost-per-carton
has decreased for four consecutive years, showing
0$1.16
how dcLINK provides sustainable benefits by giving
1$0.90
users the flexibility to make continuous improvements.
See table documenting Rawlings’ savings.
2$0.78
Administrative expenses are not included in the cost3$0.68
per-carton metric. However, Rawlings has reduced
4$0.61
its warehouse clerical staff, seasonal labor, training
time, and supervisory personnel since it began using
dcLINK and WMS, even though the business has expanded by new product line
introductions and acquisitions over the same time period.
“We’re turning out more product than we were three or four years ago, and we’re
doing it with about 25 percent less people,” said Campbell. “Plus, our inventory
accuracy has improved and picking errors have gone down considerably.”“Before there was a lot of writing -- I’d say an hour or more per container. We wereconstantly doing paperwork and not getting real work done,” said Jeff Nichols, aworker in the Washington warehouse. “Now you get more work done with a lot lesserror, and it makes the whole day a lot smoother. With the Motorola mobile unit, you
can go anywhere in the building and do your work without having to find someone toask questions.”

Data Systems International®

Global Coverage

World Headquarters

DSI Americas

North, Central, and South America

7801 West 110th Street
Overland Park, Kansas 66210 U.S.A.
+1 913.696.4000
www.DSIonline.com

DSI EMEA

Europe, Middle East, and Africa

3000 Cathedral Hill / Guildford, GU2 7YB
United Kingdom+44 1483.243560
www.emea.DSIonline.com

DSI A/P

Asia / Pacific

382 Canterbury Road / P.O. Box 42
Surrey Hills, Victoria
Australia 3127
+613 9835.0600
www.au.DSIonline.com

Unibar Inc.

A wholly owned subsidiary ofData Systems International, Inc.

3345 Auburn Road, Suite 201
Rochester Hills, Michigan 48309 U.S.A.
+1 800.731.6044
www.Unibar.com
Data Systems International, Inc., (DSI) isa leading single-source provider of global
enterprise mobility solutions that improveclients’ bottom-line results by mobilizing
operations and automating processes
with real-time access to enterpriseapplications anytime, anywhere.

As inventory accuracy has improved, Rawlings has reduced the value of its inventory
write downs by 50 percent. Back orders have been reduced more than 75 percent,and the company no longer routinely sends out search parties to track down missing
inventory.
There’s also the benefit of knowing Little Leaguers will have their uniforms comeopening day. Today Rawlings meets its on-time shipping commitments even during
its busy season.
“We’ve been able to go from being a good performer to a top performer,” said
Campbell. “I’ve got e-mails from customers stating that we’re ‘the best’ at delivering
sporting goods. For operations and customer service, we’ve been able to hit backto-back homeruns with the implementation of dcLINK, Motorola, and Oracle’s JD
Edwards WMS.”
Copyright © 2009 Data Systems International, Inc. All rights reserved. All applicable company and product names are trademarks or registered trademarks of
their respective owners. No part of this publication may be duplicated by any means without permission from Data Systems International, Inc. The information
contained in this document represents product functionality as of the date of printing. For the most recent version of this document, please visit our website atwww.DSIonline.com.							09-1204

1.800.217.8030
www.DSIonline.com