Macy’s delivers award-winning performance
ORLANDO, Fla. — Macy’s has enjoyed strong sales momentum during the early part of this year with first-quarter same-store sales up 5.4% and the second quarter off to an even stronger start with May comps up 7.4%. There are a lot of reasons for those results, but several key supply chain initiatives have made important contributions and were recognized recently at the annual VICS Collaborative Commerce Achievement Awards.
The awards event, now in its 14th year, was held in conjunction with the GS1 US U Connect Live conference in Orlando, and Macy’s won two of the six awards presented and was a participant with Manhattan Associates for a Best Third-Party Provider award.
Macy’s won the Retail Excellence award for a supply chain initiative called 1:1, which involves aggregating various types of truckload shipments to reduce the complexity, cost and time require to process vendors routings. The 1:1 program uses merge centers located in New Jersey, North Carolina and California to consolidate large volumes of less than truckload shipments into fully cubed, cross-country direct truckloads to Macy’s distribution centers.
The program required significant configuration changes to Macy’s transportation management routing algorithms development of vendor notification processes and creation of new freight allocation practices. The company converted two traditional consolidation centers into merge centers and added a new location and a third party logistics provider to support the process.
Macy’s also received the Sustainability Excellence Award for a program that will see the entire chain convert to environmentally-friendly black hangers from clear hangers by the end of the year. Macy’s uses about 300 million hangers annually, and the transition is expected to save the company’s suppliers about $12 million in annual supply chain costs. In addition, the company has implemented a wide range of resource conservation initiatives that led to a 36% reduction in copy paper usage over three years, an 11.8% reduction in shopping bags and increased recycling by 45% to 102,593 tons.
The company also added to solar panel systems last year, bringing its total installations to 39, which allowed the company to reduce its total energy usage by 4.3%.
The award Manhattan Associates received involved its partnership with Macy’s in which the department store retailer implemented Manhattan’s warehouse management system. The companies entered into a partnership in 2005 at a single location and gradually expanded their relationship. Macy’s use of Manhattan’s products helped the retailer achieve double-digit growth in online sales for the past three years.