A Partnership That Started with Footwear

Business Situation

In 2017, INTERSPORT launched a new organization-wide Quality concept. Quality is no longer just a sourcing matter, but has become a strategic focus point. All suppliers in their supply chain are now required to pass several checkpoints. This assures INTERSPORT that their factories maintain their quality standards and their transparency requirements. INTERSPORT customers demand a high level of quality from the brand, so INTERSPORT expects the same from their suppliers.

At quality inspection level, INTERSPORT was dealing with a very manual and time-consuming process, using paper excel sheets to record the data. This gave them very limited analysis capabilities. They were lacking real time insights into their quality issues, a detailed overview of the defects, and information about the performance of their factories. This was making it difficult for them to make fact-based commercial decisions.

Solution

In 2017, as part of their new Quality strategy, INTERSPORT decided to digitize their quality inspections. After talking to different vendors on the market, they quickly found TradeBeyond offered the best solution.

INTERSPORT went live with TradeBeyond in September 2017, and ran a pilot for their footwear inspections. It provided immediate benefits. Their transparency increased from day one and TradeBeyond’s real time analysis report brought useful insights. They decided to implement the TradeBeyond software not only for footwear inspections, but for apparel and hardware inspections as well.

But it didn’t stop there. After that, TradeBeyond helped INTERSPORT to digitize their pre-production sample approval process. And with TradeBeyond’s events management tool, called Milestone, they are now able to manage and follow up on their production schedule.

In addition, TradeBeyond and INTERSPORT are currently going through the process of digitizing the technical audits. And the next step will be to add TradeBeyond’s Non-Conformity Reports module to their solution, in order to easily request, track, review and approve NCRs.

INTERSPORT is convinced that the combination of these different modules will strengthen their quality control and audit process as a whole.

Results

Partnering up with TradeBeyond has been been a rewarding experience for INTERSPORT:

• They reduced their inspection team travel operation cost by 30%

• They reduced the time spent on manually creating inspection reports, and the administrative work resulting from that

• They’ve moved from quality control, to quality improvement

• Their suppliers in China, Bangladesh, Cambodia and Myanmar are now able to perform self-inspections, with

• TradeBeyond’s standardized inspection system

• Real-time quality data analysis allows them to focus on hot issues and manage corrective action plans much faster

• The TradeBeyond system allows them to clearly structure user roles, define responsibilities and allocate tasks

• 2 years after introducing TradeBeyond, they increased their transparency by 50%

In 2017, we started looking for a partner who could deliver on our high quality standards and found Pivot88 (TradeBeyond) was the best vendor on the market. Not only does Pivot88 (TradeBeyond) have the most expertise in digitizing quality inspections, they also bring the most user-friendly and flexible interface, supported in a multitude of different languages.

Jacker Chan
Head of Operation (INTERSPORT Development)

About INTERSPORT

INTERSPORT was founded in Berne, Switzerland in 1968 as the first ever international sports-based retail group. In December 2012, INTERSPORT acquired the athletic speciality footwear chain, The Athlete's Foot, with 550 stores in 30 countries. Today, INTERSPORT is one of the world's leading sporting goods retailers, with more than 5,500 affiliated stores in 43 countries.

In total, the INTERSPORT Group has a turnover of EUR 11.9 billion and is represented in 57 countries on all five continents. The international slogan of INTERSPORT is "Sport to the people".