Nambé EDI Automates Order Processing and Reduces Chargebacks with SPS

Based in the Santa Fe region of New Mexico, Nambé has been known for its handcrafted, high-quality functional designs since 1951. Its products offer discerning consumers the unique combination of remarkable design, everyday usefulness, and the essence of casual luxury.

Outsourcing Eliminated Nambé EDI Department Headaches

Over time Nambé’s existing Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) system had become a burden on its IT department. Many hours were spent maintaining the internal system so it would send and receive its order, shipping and invoicing documents electronically with its retail customers. Like most organizations, the EDI system had changed over the years with each EDI manager adding custom scripts and sub-routines to adopt the EDI mapping requirements of their trading partners. Unfortunately, few changes were documented to help subsequent IT staff to decipher or modify the system. Daily debugging was required just to keep the existing processes running.

In addition, Nambé faced another difficulty due to its location. In the Santa Fe area, talented artists and designers abound but EDI professionals were often difficult to recruit. The region simply didn’t have a labor pool with trained EDI professionals, especially in Espanola where its EDI operations were based. An EDI expert on staff at Nambé wasn’t always a possibility.

Nambe EDI Integration with SPS Provides Hands-Free Solution

In mid-2005, Jeff Creecy joined Nambé as its Vice President of Information Technology and recognized their EDI operations needed a dramatic change. Luckily, the company was already looking into outsourcing the EDI function to replace its current solution, as well as its in-house shipping application. After a thorough review of outsourced solutions, Jeff and his team selected SPS Commerce for their EDI service provider.

By December 2005, SPS Commerce was managing Nambé’s purchase orders and invoices with its department store customers, including AAFES, Belk, Bloomingdales, Macys, Neiman Marcus, and Saks Fifth Avenue. Nambé elected to wait on implementing shipping notices, until its new shipping solution for truckload and LTL shipments, Insight Software, was in production.

In January 2006, SPS integration with Insight began in order to provide Nambé the capability to send Advanced Ship Notices (ASNs) via EDI. To integrate the two systems, SPS Commerce’s EDI experts worked with Nambé to define a dataset that could be extracted from the shipping application and automatically sent to SPS EDI service. The SPS service would then be able to create all necessary ASNs for its retail customers. As of April 2006, all ASNs are automatically sent via EDI using the integrated process.

Reduced Chargebacks Offer a Rapid ROI with SPS Fulfillment EDI

With the variable reliability of the previous EDI system, chargebacks from its retail customers had become a financial issue. Once live with SPS Commerce’s EDI service, Nambé reduced its chargebacks by more than 50%. All order processing is automated and integrated directly with Nambé’s ERP system, resulting in a handsfree EDI solution.