Company Profile
Since it's founding in the early 1900's, this premier manufacturer in the hardware/hand tool industry has focused on making the finest products and accessories available to professional users. Today, their name stands for the highest quality, most durable and reliable professional tools money can buy. With a reputation for innovative design and pioneering new products that have become standards for the industry, this company continues to forge ahead of its rivals by strengthening critical resources and capitalizing on synergistic opportunities to compete in a global market.

Still considered to be the top brand by many professionals across industries, their tools and accessories are fast becoming a top choice among a growing number of consumers and homeowners looking for a higher quality product providing more power, features, longevity and consistent performance.

Challenge
This company actively promotes its products with a variety of special offers and incentives throughout the year. With increasing competition in one key market and favorable response to a particularly popular product line, they looked to expand on their "product rebate" promotions to include additional accessories. The purpose was to provide improved response services, gain market share, and control net fulfillment cost per response. Critical to the promotion was timely access to response data in order to forecast demand for smooth supply chain performance in addition to calculating cost per redemption and determining return on investment (ROI).

Solution
MDS designed a quick response database system for order capture, inventory management, automated order qualification, and specialized fulfillment. The system also had to be capable of delivering data for reporting and analysis. With a simple, yet effective fulfillment system, this client was able to match inventory levels to demand by quickly measuring emerging response patterns and forecasting future inventory demand from MDS reports. This system enabled the client to achieve its goals:

A] Initiate timely, just-in-time inventory production with its vendor base
B] Ship on time
C] Reduce customer service burdens
D] Measure per response / total fulfillment costs for future budgeting and calculating ROI.

Successes
Beyond achieving predefined goals, many value-added benefits accrued to the program. First, a lower overall net cost per response was realized with MDS over former methods and suppliers. By having MDS also fulfill all related promotional materials and literature to its nationwide retail channels, dealers received campaign materials complete and on time to successfully jump-start the promotion and create demand. Product sales and response went well beyond a projected 5,000 response benchmark set in previous years, exceeding 30,000 rebates in the first year with MDS. MDS provided consistent quality, accurate and timely fulfillment, and expert handling of the varied challenges of an unexpected high response. MDS back-end response services combined with the successful deployment of front-end POS materials to the field fueled high response rates and drove the promotion toward a successful conclusion.

This company believes MDS management of end-to-end fulfillment services for the program was as much a primary reason for its success and overwhelming response levels as the popularity of this perennial favorite "free product with purchase" offer.