Rocky Brands’ Focus on Streamlining Processes Benefits Customer Experience

Rocky Brands Inc., a Nelsonville, Ohio-based footwear and apparel manufacturer, has been focusing on streamlining and integrating seamless processes—efforts that are paying off in improved customer experience.

The company, which designs, manufactures and markets outdoor, work, western, lifestyle, and military footwear and apparel, recently implemented software from NGC to bolster efficiency in a variety of ways.

According to Mary Lorenz, VP of Strategy Execution and Process Improvement at Rocky Brands, these improvements are part of an ongoing initiative focused on processes and resources. 

“A couple of years ago we kicked off a ‘Lean Initiative’, which is a proven process improvement philosophy that helps corporations maximize customer value using a minimal amount of resources like time, people, and space,” Lorenz told Loyalty360. “Several Lean Projects were implemented as a result.”

To determine where to focus efforts for these projects, it was imperative for the company to take a step back and determine the people and processes involved.

“An important step is identifying who your customer is,” Tawre Dellavalle, Commercialization Manager at Rocky Brands, told Loyalty360. “For us, it wasn’t just our end user–it included everyone from accounting and the distribution center, to the marketing and e-com teams, to vendors. We are our own customer in many ways.”

To improve the experience for these various users, which includes both consumers and wholesalers, Rocky Brands leveraged NGC’s PLM and Supply Chain Management (SCM) systems. According to Lorenz, PLM has been effective in the marketing and ecommerce departments by acting as a “one-stop shop” for all product data, eliminating repetitive work and improving accuracy of product descriptions. The PLM system also eliminated data errors and improved speed to market.

Rocky Brands has also implemented NGC’s new EZ-Ship software, a factory scan/pack system that integrates with NGC's web-based (SCM) system, ensuring carton compliance and inventory accuracy. This has improved product flow, as well as benefitted the company’s finished goods inventory management.

The overall result of the NGC software implementation has been a streamlining of processes that results in an elevated and consistent customer experience.

“We have several brands and each needs to tell its story in a consistent manner,” Dellavalle said, regarding the importance of packaging. “Using templates, standard work, and utilizing eSPS technology, we are able to tell independent line stories consistently. Our efforts have streamlined processes all the way to the end consumer.”

Lorenz said the recent focus has been on what the value proposition is to customers, and how technology can be strategically utilized to meet objectives.

“We ask, ‘how can we deploy systems to better serve our customers?’ ” Lorenz said. “We want to increase our value proposition by leveraging new and existing technology.”

Recent Content

Membership and Pricing

Videos and podcasts

Membership and Pricing