Aptean Apparel ERP Exenta Edition
Royce Too Puts its best foot forward with paperless warehouse management from Aptean Apparel ERP Exenta Edition.
Industry
Apparel Manufacturing
Challenges
» Previous ERP was tailored for retail
operations when the company sells only through wholesale channels
Benefits
» Aptean Apparel ERP Exenta Edition
sub-identifies customer specific requirements for items identified by a single universal product code
» System has upgraded eight times
without ever breaking the applicationlevel code written by Royce Too
» Royce Too was able to reallocate 20% of employee time to more revenue impactful business areas
Royce Too—once known as Royce Hosiery, and a major player in the U.S. hosiery market since 1949—has undergone a quiet revolution since being acquired by Japan-based Okamoto Corporation in 2008. Royce designs and sources socks for such leading brands as Dockers, Nautica, Saucony and Dickies, and ships products to department stores, national chains, and other retailers. By the time it became part of Okamoto, the company had already outsourced its manufacturing, but it still ran two distribution centers in Martinsburg, W. Va.—the same town where its hosiery mills were once located—and oversaw operations from its headquarters in the Empire State Building.
The Situation In 2009, when Larry Warehime joined the company as Vice President of Information Technology, he found a systems division struggling with software that didn’t meet the company’s needs. The most serious lack was in the enterprise resource planning (ERP) system, which was tailored for retail operations, though Royce Too sells only through wholesale channels. “We made a decision to change the ERP system back to an apparel-based system,” Warehime says, “and we looked at several of those, but we’re a hosiery company, and even apparel systems couldn’t handle hosiery very well.” Vital information for hosiery companies—such as how many pairs constitute a retails unit or which color is placed on top of the unit—bears little relevance to most apparel companies, Warehime explains.