Sears DCs Use "DOMS" to Gain New Insight into Inventory

BOONTON, N.J. - May 6, 2013 - PRLog -- Sears Home Services, the retailer's division that delivers appliance parts for in-home repairs, faced some startling inefficiencies.

The division had five distribution centers, yet there was no inventory visibility from one location to another. Say a customer in California needed a part. If the California DC didn't have it in stock, Sears would buy the part even if the part was sitting in the DC in Chicago.

"It was a vast network, very complicated, and unfortunately, every single [location] operated in a silo," says Eric Gasmann, director of parts supply chain network for Sears. "We had a tremendous amount of trapped inventory."

To address its inventory issues, Sears Home Services decided to ditch its old-fashioned paper-and-pencil picking in favor of a WMS and a distributed order management system (DOMS) that tracks inventory across DCs and eveninside thousands of trucks driven by technicians.

Details on Sears DOMS appears in the May issue of Distribution Center Management.

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