‘ The Answers We Need ’
When Kevin and Noreen Roberts started Creative Costuming and Designs out of their home in 1992, they did not know what was in store for their tiny company. Through their passion for designing and sewing great costumes, they were soon industry leaders. Their unique design aesthetic became hugely popular among schools and teams across the U.S.
As often happens, success brought many new problems with it. When their operation grew to encompass multiple commercial buildings and a large team of workers, communication became a major concern. Delivering on time is essential in their business, as is quality control. Add inventory management concerns and the need to streamline almost every aspect of their operation, and a call to Alchemy Consulting was definitely in the cards.
“We have built CCD’s reputation based on excellent customer service and attention to detail,” says owner and CFO Kevin Roberts. “Our operation went from a mostly paper-based system and moved toward a fully automated system with the help of Alchemy Consulting. We now have much more visibility into our design, production, and quality control processes. This has allowed us to grow our company and provide our customers with even better, faster service, and we now have the answers we need to make difficult business decisions.”
Alchemy built CCD a system to exactly match every part of their process:
- Customer web ordering
- Scheduling of ship date with backwards-calculated milestones to determine production start date
- Creation of custom design and automatic transmission of quote to customer
- Tracking of swatches sent to customer and approval
- Web-based entry of team measurements
- Inventory resource planning, ordering and receiving
- Assignment of cutting
- Assignment to sewing workers
- Quality control inspection/documentation of costumes using iPads
- Shipping
- Invoicing
“One of Alchemy’s specialties is manufacturing systems,” says Alchemy Consulting President Bob Shockey. “Each manufacturing operation is unique, and a custom solution like this is the best possible way to address the many facets of the manufacturing process. It’s very gratifying to us to see a company like CCD soar to new heights with the help of software we wrote and deployed for them.”
