Retailer reduces operational costs with web-based content and report management solution

Company Overview

Destination XL, the largest omni-channel specialty menswear retailer, has 300+ stores in the U.S. and Canada. DXL offers a premium, personalized shopping experience in-store and digitally, offering menswear designed for a certain build and proportions with sizes beginning at XL. In 2020, online sales accounted for 40.4% of total retail sales. DXL has more than 2,000 private label and name-brand clothing and shoe styles.

Business Challenge

With consumers buying a variety of styles both online and at 300+ stores, DXL has to order, stock, ship and track an extraordinary number of SKUs and share vast volumes of data nationwide.

As an example, DXL’s best-selling pant has 43 size combinations compared to the average retailer’s 15 size combinations, and the company sources from over 28 factories in eight countries. When the COO asked IT to reduce operational costs while maintaining and even improving its service to stores, IT knew what to do.

Leaders, corporate and IT, immediately targeted the paper-based inventory and sales reports as well as the shipping manifests. The company’s C-suite executives, senior leaders and managers simply didn’t have instant, easy access to recent, accurate data in the user-friendly formats they needed to optimize their retail business. The data gap also had an impact on how they serviced their stores and online business.

Paper documents were a challenge to search, manipulate and share. On top of that, the paper, printing, mailing and storage costs had become prohibitive, particularly since certain data and reports had to be kept for seven years or more.

Solution

DXL’s management team recognized Redwood Reporting’s web-based, centralized report processing, management and distribution solution was exactly what they needed to cut operating costs and improve service to their employees and consumers – in-store and online.

Results

Redwood Reporting, fully implemented and operational in less than six weeks, gave C-suite executives, senior leaders and managers the recent, accurate standard and custom reports they needed to optimize daily operations.

DXL now relies on Redwood Reporting’s Bundler to identify and provide only the information that C-suite executives need from a report when they have to home in on different, but specific areas of the business depending on economic and market conditions as well as the time of year. Despite the constant shifts in focus and perspective, Redwood Reporting guarantees these decision-makers have the information they need to react in the present and plan for the future.

“Redwood Reporting is the only way we can bring it all together in one place, regardless of the file format,” said Scanlon. “I don’t know how you can live without a report distribution system in a big retail company.”

Aside from the executives, any employee or department that requires business intelligence turns to Redwood Reporting. Finance, sales, store operations, and merchandising all recognize it is a vital reporting tool at both the store and corporate levels.

The various DXL teams can identify the key trends, patterns, and relevant data quickly and easily. That’s because Redwood Reporting modernizes, standardizes, and can reformat every one of those 11,000 reports into a more user-friendly format to help employees more readily identify and clearly understand the information they need for the task at hand.

All DXL data and reports are now electronic and available from a single, centralized user-friendly, web-based platform. With all data and reports, but particularly those that must be archived for seven years or more, electronic retention has significantly reduced related costs, such as human resources, equipment and physical space.

“We can keep data as long as necessary and retired countless file cabinets once Redwood Reporting replaced our legacy paper archives and storage,” said Scanlon.

Redwood Reporting certainly supports and enhances decision-making and it’s also had a dramatic impact on the bottom line. For example, printing costs alone dropped 75% the moment DXL stopped printing the bulk of their regular reports. In addition, the switch to electronic distribution drastically reduced the costs associated with traditional mail and postage and expedited delivery times.

Stores now receive the shipping manifests mere minutes after the trucks leave the loading docks instead of days later.