—KITCHENER, ONT — Cober Printing the decision to add Descartes’s Pick, Pack and Ship application to its operation came from its increased involvement in the web-to-print business. Todd Cober, vice president, said that the Descartes application has allowed it to gain control over the shipping process. “We are usually shipping about 75 to 100 orders a day,” he said. “It became very cumbersome to figure out where they’re all going, now with the Descartes technology we can scan the product and it will tell us what bin to put it into.”

Although they did not add the system with the idea of expanding their business in mind, Cober said that it has unintentionally put them into the fulfillment and distribution business. “It puts us into a whole new business that we weren’t in before because it gives us the software that a lot of the fulfillment distribution businesses don’t have,” he said. “They are still doing it manually. We originally bought it for our current business but it is becoming useful for new business.”

In addition to scanning and sorting the end product, Cober added that the Descartes system’s ability to track orders throughout the plant has been great for their productivity. “At any given time a client can call us and say we want this order tomorrow when really it was due a week tomorrow,” he said. “We have to be able to track it down and before we would have no idea where it was with the 700 orders in house.”