Established in 1961, Giant Tiger is one of the largest privately help retail chains in Canada. With over 260 store locations across the country, Giant Tiger is known for their community support and service.
In 2021, Giant Tiger implemented techSHIP into their shipping stations and achieved massive success:
- 75% reduction in labor while maintaining similar order volume
- 256% increase in shipments per hour, jumping from 39 to up to 145 per hour
- 43% savings in shipping costs through rate shopping, zone skipping, and carrier optimization
- A faster, one-scan workflow that loads dimensions, weight, and prints labels in seconds
These substantial wins haven’t come at the cost of people. Their growth curve has allowed them to hire less or repurpose labor.
"When your customers are your neighbors, you want to do things right."
Gordon Reid, founder of Giant Tiger.
The Story of Giant Tiger’s Warehouse Success
At the Giant Tiger warehouse, they had 6 shipping stations that were holding up their 8 packing stations. But they didn’t have room to add any more shipping stations.
They then moved to another warehouse and were running 12 shipping stations to support 8 packing stations.
Giant Tiger was first introduced to techSHIP while touring another warehouse.
They saw how quickly and easily shipments were able to get out the door and saw the potential techSHIP had to solve their bottleneck problem.
In 2021, techSHIP was integrated with their WMS within weeks. That year, Giant Tiger went from 12 shipping stations supporting 8 packing stations to 3 techSHIP stations supporting 14 packing stations. For Giant Tiger, this translated to a 75% reduction in labor to move to a similar order count. Reports Giant Tiger, “Our bigger savings is actually in optimizing labor.”
Labor savings were achieved because of techSHIP’s ability to integrate to robotic conveyers, automated label scans, applications, hardware and processes…anything that needed to be integrated at the warehouse level.
In addition to the 75% reduction labor, Giant Tiger also achieved a 43% in shipping cost savings. Prior to moving with techSHIP, Giant Tiger was considering other solutions. However, other options didn’t offer freight compensation,which meant Giant Tiger had to individually negotiate rates with each carrier they wanted to use.
With techSHIP, there was already a network of partners built to help customers like Giant Tiger get the best rate possible, while also offering zone skipping and air skipping—without reselling freight.
This allowed Giant Tiger to squeeze every ounce of savings on their shipping and avoid individually negotiating with each carrier.
Lastly, Giant Tiger was able to go from 39 shipments per hour to 139, a 256% increase. When asked what their biggest, unexpected win has been with techSHIP, they replied, “It’s the speed. The speed has been fantastic.” Prior to techSHIP, their fastest shipper was able to
achieve 55 shipments per hour. Since techSHIP, they’re achieving 124 to 145 shipments per hour.
Using a dimensioner, scale, and one-scan shipping method, within seconds all the information is loaded, including weight and dimensions, and a label is printed out.
Because of the increase in speed, Giant Tiger’s 3 techSHIP stations exceed the capacity of their 14 packing stations.
As noted by Giant Tiger, “I think the biggest win was moving from 12 shipping stations prior to techSHIP to 3 shipping stations to process a similar order volume. This is most apparent in the number of shipments per hour.”
📄 Read the full case study here
