[amayausers] Re: Do-It-Yourself Disney - Company Purchases Amaya's For Commercial Use

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From the Melco Website:

Do-It-Yourself Disney
 
April 01, 2007

With RF-enabled technology from VeriStitch and a new in-house embroidery 
department, Disney has put creative power in the hands of its customers.

Even when you're on the lookout for it, it's startling to see the large head of 
a Mickey Mouse silhouette come into view amidst the very rural landscape of 
Highway 176 in Jonesville, SC. 

The larger-than-life icon adorns the front of the 500,000-square-foot worldwide 
fulfillment center for Disney Shopping Inc., the online shopping destination 
for The Walt Disney Company. Disney Shopping has grown so much that last year, 
when online sales reached 80 percent vs. catalog sales of 20 percent, the 
company discontinued its catalog and shifted to a 100 percent Internet-based 
sales model. 

All genuine (non-licensed) Disney merchandise, from apparel, watches and beach 
towels to toys, movies and jewelry, comes through this highly automated 
state-of-the-art facility on its way to homes around the world.

"Everything shipped is a one-off, a single customer order," says Joe Kiley, 
senior manager, facilities and engineering. "Everything we pick and ship is 
done on a piece level, not on a case level. No one orders 36 Goofy shirts," he 
says. 

Last year, the facility processed 9 million items for individual customers, or 
"guests," as they are referred to by the company. 

Making it personal  
The Jonesville distribution center is also home to the company's monogramming, 
engraving and sublimation operations. Of the 9 million items processed at the 
facility last year, 1 million traveled through the Personalization Department 
(PZ), situated on the warehouse floor midway between the automated Crisplant 
sorters and the pick-to-cart staging area. 

Launched in 1998 ? the same year that Disney's fulfillment operations were 
moved from Memphis, TN, to their current location ? the PZ started small, with 
12 Barudan Meistergram 900 XLC zigzag monogramming machines. 

Since that time, the company has grown significantly, and along with it, the 
demand for personalization, says Kiley. "(The opportunity to personalize) makes 
our products unique from something you can buy at Wal-Mart," he says. 

Indeed. A wide range of products, from polo shirts to sweatshirts and kids' 
backpacks to watches, can be personalized with names, about 95 percent of which 
are stitched. (Disney does not charge its customers for personalization.) 

Additionally, in February, Disney Shopping took its personalization offerings a 
huge step forward, adding embroidery options to its monogramming services, and 
expanding the ways in which customers can individualize their Disney 
merchandise. 

Now, in addition to personalizing product with their names, customers can, for 
example, create their own Disney polo by selecting the shirt color, the 
particular Disney character to be embroidered and the thread color and font for 
monogramming. By the time the holiday season hits this year, the company 
expects to extend this level of customization to the bulk of its products that 
can be embroidered. 

Seasonal spikes make training tough 
Personalization is a huge draw for the customer, but as is often the case with 
customization, it adds a layer of difficulty to the process, and Disney's 
operations are no exception. 

Over the years, the PZ expanded to accommodate growth, adding 38 monogramming 
machines to bring the total to 50, but it continued to confront a number of 
challenges that stymied efficiency and added to production costs. 

Many of its challenges stemmed from the fact that sales at Disney Shopping are 
extremely seasonal; personalization naturally follows the same trend. Steady 
sales throughout the year spike to unbelievable levels come October, when 
holiday shopping begins. And it doesn't creep up gently. It comes in with a 
bang, says Jennifer Hicks, engineering manager. 

Last year, for example, the PZ went from monogramming 5,000 units per week to 
more than 80,000 units per week in the space of just four weeks. During the 
holiday season, the monogramming machines are kept busy around the clock ? 
three eight-hour shifts keep them running 24/7. 

The entire facility, which employs approximately 150 hourly workers through 
most of the year, ramps up to more than 700 when the holiday season rolls 
around. The PZ experiences the largest growth to its base staff, 
percentage-wise, expanding from about 15 employees year round to 300 employees 
during the peak period. (Disney refers to its employees as "cast members.") 
From a training perspective, that used to present Disney with an enormous 
challenge each year. 

Disney's monogramming procedures were complex. Each item to be monogrammed was 
routed with its own processing card, in a tote, to the PZ. There, an operator 
identified the style on the card and flipped through a 100-plus-page three-ring 
binder to locate the particular specifications for that style.

"You had to find the item in the book to figure out the thread color, the font, 
the size of the lettering, horizontal spacing, vertical spacing, line spacing, 
stitch count, sewing speed, width and orientation of the item in the machine," 
says Kiley. 

Once located, all of this information had to be keyed into the Meistergram for 
each order, along with the person's name to be monogrammed. This took time, and 
it was also highly prone to errors from "fat fingering," especially at the pace 
at which the department was moving, says Hicks. (Also, Disney was using 
cumbersome hoops to position items on the machines. It now uses more efficient 
clamps to hold materials in place.)  Compounding the difficulty was the need to 
train a huge group of employees each year, which was a time-intensive process. 
It required approximately two weeks to train operators "so they could even be 
left by themselves, and four to six weeks before they could get up to speed" ? 
basically the length of the holiday season, she says. 

As such, the department would hire seasonal employees to train before the rush 
? adding to its labor costs ? so that the PZ would be efficient by the time the 
orders started pouring in. 

Streamlining operations  
As the demand for personalization grew, the company's leadership recognized 
that it needed to improve its procedures. 

In 2004, Disney purchased the Veri-Stitch Direct-to-Sew? solution to help speed 
and streamline operations. It has ? in spades. In fact, the $200,000 system 
paid for itself in three months, Kiley says. 

How so? VeriStitch allows Disney to bypass the manual process of keying 
information into the monogramming machine by interfacing directly with the 
company's online order entry system. 

Each job order is matched in the company's server with its own job number, 
which includes all of the information necessary for the monogramming machine to 
perform the operation, including the templates for each style. 

The operator simply scans the processing card with a handheld RF reader, which 
automatically queries the server and downloads all of the job's specifications 
and the customer's name directly into the machine. Then the operator positions 
the product on the machine and starts the embroidery cycle. 

This has eliminated the search through the binder and the manual keying 
process, which has significantly boosted productivity. It also has eliminated 
keying errors, which has reduced product quality problems by half, says Kiley. 
But the biggest benefit, by far, he says, is the reduction in the training 
cycle. 

What used to take four to six weeks is down to two to three days, says Hicks. 

The Direct-to-Sew solution has provided other significant benefits. Previously, 
for example, there was no accurate way to determine the run-time of the 
machines, or who monogrammed what. "How well (the employees) did was completely 
self-declared," says Hicks. 

The new system has improved productivity tracking by "leaps and bounds," 
allowing for true accountability, she says. That, in turn, has made it possible 
to set up performance standards based on each style. 

The ability to track production also has, if not completely eliminated, 
somewhat shrunk the PZ "black hole" by allowing increased visibility into the 
possible location of product in that department. The PZ is the one place in the 
fulfillment facility where the WMS system "loses sight" of the product, and 
where it is possible for that product to "get lost." 

Now, the VeriStitch system allows some visibility into product whereabouts ? 
helpful during holiday season when thousands of totes are stacked as far and 
wide as the eye can see. "You're looking out at a sea of totes," says Kiley. 

Before the implementation of the system, one tote accidentally placed out of 
order would be virtually impossible to locate. But "with VeriStitch you can 
say, ?Has anyone run this unit?' [If someone has,] it'll say, ?Yes, Joe just 
logged it in here.' Previously you would not know that," says Kiley. "And if it 
hasn't been monogrammed, you feel better about doing a re-run," he adds. 

Expanding customization  
Having mastered monogramming, Disney recently decided to diversify its 
customization options into embroidery. Needing quick-turn capabilities and the 
ability to do one-offs, the company is bringing its embroidery operations 
in-house, rather than having product embroidered en masse in Asia. 

PZ is now home to six brand new Melco 16-needle Amaya embroidery machines. 
Although not as fast as the powerful zigzag monogramming machines, they are 
more versatile, capable of handling monogramming and embroidery on one machine. 

Disney is launching this new portion of its operations with a big leg up, 
harnessing the lessons learned from its monogramming operations to develop a 
system for its embroidery operations that will minimize cycle time and training 
time, and allow operators to hit the ground running.

 
As such, Disney is working with VeriStitch and Melco to integrate the 
Direct-to-Sew system with the embroidery machines. Templates for monogramming 
will be similar to those for the Meistergram. Digitized Disney characters, a 
bit more complex, also will be pre-formatted into the VeriStitch database. 

This will allow the operator to simply scan a bar code and place the item in 
the machine. Both operations, monogramming and embroidery, will be in one "sew 
job," and will run at once. There will be no need for three-ring binders or 
keying of information into the system. 

At press time, Disney was putting the finishing touches on the first group of 
digitized characters and was set to roll out the first of its new customization 
options: "Create Your Own Disney Polo," which will be initially offered with 17 
characters, and shortly thereafter with more than 30. Similar campaigns will 
follow, and likely the need for more embroidery machines. 

Because all of the machines communicate through RF technology, with no cables 
or wires affixing them to the floor, it is easy to rearrange machinery in the 
PZ to accommodate changes in volume, personnel or additional machinery, which 
makes for the most productive and lean working environment, says Kiley. 

And what of the 50 Meistergrams?  
Some items, such as printed beach towels, simply do not lend themselves well to 
embroidery. Products that require only monogramming will continue to run on the 
Meistergrams. "There will always be some use for the machine," says Kiley. How 
much is still an unknown.

"We don't know yet, as a business, if we're going to cannibalize the 
monogramming with the embroidery, or if it's just going to be an add-on," says 
Kiley. 

But expectations are high. "People love to have the opportunity to 
differentiate themselves," he concludes.

Jordan K. Speer is senior editor of Apparel. She can be reached at 
jspeer@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx .

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