Orchid Extender helps K&K Interiors keep their house in order

The Company

K&K Interiors, Inc., established in 1996 and based in Ohio USA, is a leading wholesale supplier of home decor, offering retailers a vast range of everyday and seasonal items. The K&K design teams are continually developing new product lines and visual presentations to keep a fresh, new look for their customers. (www.kkinteriors.com)

The Challenge

K&K import huge volumes of products from their suppliers. A given Purchase Order will often contain dozens of line items, to be fulfilled in multiple shipments.

To facilitate receipt at the warehouse, an alphanumeric string identifying a specific shipping container needs to be captured against each PO line item, via an Optional Field in Sage 300 ERP, and fed into an external Warehouse Management System.

Container details are not known at the time of PO entry, and can change right up to the shipment date. Updating dozens of line items to assign lengthy Container IDs was a laborious, repetitive and error prone task, made worse by the Optional Field data entry being several clicks away from the main Sage 300 screen.

The Solution

K&K’s Sage 300 Business Partner, DataQuest, saw an opportunity to streamline this process using a combination of Orchid’s Extender and Notes products. They approached Orchid with a proposal for a customization.

Extender would:

• Introduce an “Add Container” button to allow new container details to be entered against a PO.
• Allow one of the known Container IDs for the PO to be easily associated with each line item, and automatically written back to the appropriate Optional Field.
• Run scripts to identify all Container IDs associated with the PO, and any line items that had not yet had a container assigned.

Notes would be used to display the results of these scripts.

The Result

Justin Slater, Purchasing Manager for K&K, was delighted with the outcome, and reported that the warehouse staff were equally enthusiastic.

The warehouse staff are absolutely stoked about the efficiencies they are seeing.

What had been tedious and time consuming work could now be accomplished with a few key strokes, and the integrity checking and prominent warnings built into the solution also meant far fewer data entry errors.