Spendless Shoes and Ligentia have collaborated over 10 years to deliver ever better supply chain value through ocean freight management, customs brokerage and integrated supply chain visibility through the Ligentix Connect platform.
Spendless Shoes is a major Australian footwear retailer, with 362 retail stores located across Australia today. In 2013, Ligentia was selected as their international freight forwarder and customs clearance agent into Australia.
Over the past 10 years, this relationship has gone from strength to strength. Today, we continue to provide ocean freight management and customs brokerage for Spendless Shoes, as well as provide them with integrated supply chain visibility through the Ligentix Connect platform.
The original tender had Ligentia competing with some major global forwarding brands. Ligentia was selected because we were able to compete on price, while also fitting with Spendless Shoes’ values of honesty and transparency. Ligentia is most comfortable acting as a supply chain value extension to our customers’ teams, and this fit perfectly with what Spendless Shoes was trying to achieve.
But it wasn’t all smooth sailing. Spendless Shoes had some specific requirements for their solution that did pose a challenge for Ligentia.
Spendless Shoes is a proud South Australian business and has always had its national distribution centre located in the Adelaide area, even though it costs the business more to service their network from Adelaide, than, for example a location on the east coast of Australia.
As part of the original tender, Ligentia sourced shipping line partners that would help us navigate containers from China to Adelaide Port as competitively in transit and cost as they could to east coast Australia. Today Spendless Shoes benefits from two sailings per week to Adelaide, arriving on different days of week:
Soon after we took over the ocean freight contract and customs handling, we started looking for other opportunities to improve the Spendless Shoes supply chain. At the time, Spendless Shoes was struggling with an antiquated ERP and accurate data was difficult to come by. By 2015, Spendless Shoes needed our technology solution and we implemented Ligentix Connect to provide them with source to shelf visibility, which was integrated into their ERP and onboarded by their buying offices and vendors spanning China and Vietnam.
ERP integration was the trickiest part – a team of technology and supply chain experts went to Adelaide to workshop with the customer ways we could get data in and out of the ERP. Spendless Shoes demonstrated a good deal of trust as they provided us deep access to the ERP and their sensitive data to ensure that we could figure out the best solution.
In 2019, Spendless Shoes brought in a new ERP system and the Ligentia and Spendless IT/Systems teams came together again to collaborate to integrate this new system with Ligentix as well with the collaboration of their internal IT / Systems teams.
Through the ocean freight contract over the last 10 years, we have also been focussed on delivering supply chain best practice to maximise efficiency and ensure that the supply chain can handle disruption and peaks.
This has included a 20 foot elimination programme, optimising their 40foot containers and an offshore buyers consolidation programme at our Ningbo and Shenzhen hub facilities. We also provide an east coast cross docking solution for seasonal campaigns, particularly the Spendless Shoes back to school campaign, which runs in December and January in their retail stores. To ensure we can handle the peaks associated with Australians preparing for the return to school at the end of the summer holidays, 150 containers are prep loaded out of China in September to land containers in sequence through month of November. Replenishment inventory is sent to Adelaide, while first and second drop store allocation is delivered via Brisbane and Melbourne to ensure that new school stock is in retail stores around the country in the lead up to Christmas.
Spendless Shoes has had a long and rewarding partnership with Ligentia; in part due to their supply chain systems and technology, which we believed would assist transform visibility of our purchase orders through their life cycles from our Asian-based factories through to our NDC in Adelaide (as has proven to be the case subsequently); and in part due to our initial impressions of the quality of people/team and customer service processes Dean Neville had clearly built at Ligentia throughout his entire business over all locations. We have been delighted to continue our relationship and to partner with Dean and his team at Ligentia over the last 9 years, continuing to entrust Ligentia with such a critical component of our supply chain.
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