Boosting warehouse and inventory management with Dynamics GP: A glove maker's story

When Watson Gloves was established back in 1918 it was a small organization, providing gear to dock workers in Vancouver. Now based in Burnaby, British Columbia, the company has grown into the largest retail distributor of "gloves for work, home and play" in western Canada. Working to meet customer demand across North America, Watson Gloves implemented a warehouse management solution that necessitated costly and unsuccessful customizations to try to align two different databases. To overcome incongruous data between Microsoft Dynamics GP and the company's real inventory, Watson Gloves partnered first with Fine Solutions, a value added reseller servicing Microsoft ERPs. Fine Solutions linked Watson Gloves with HighJump Collect for GP and helped launch an implementation project for a new warehouse management system.

MSDynamicsWorld spoke with Robert Waugh, Regional Manager, for HighJump, the group that ran the Watson Gloves implementation. 

MSDW: Can you describe the configuration you found when you began the engagement? I understand, there were two databases that didn't communicate and only 90% accuracy with the ERP system, leading to inventory issues.  

Robert Waugh: When we came in they were just using Dynamics GP. They had another warehouse system that was a separate database, but it just didn't function properly. Those two systems would never be in sync with one another. When we came in, although they were technically running GP, they were an all manual, paper-based environment.

Inventory was pretty inaccurate. When we came in they were writing off about $600,000 of $15 million in inventory.

The company felt inventory was terrible and they would shut down ...