The Company

Moog is an international manufacturer of aerospace and military components located in Buffalo, New York. Moog has sales exceeding $2 billion and has operations in the United States, Europe, and Asia.

The Challenge

Moog was seeking a vendor that would supply them with a single ordering platform for promotional products and stationery. Specifically, Moog was looking for a single supplier for the entire organization across the globe. Pricing advantages, streamlined paper work, and standardized branding became the goal across the entire Moog enterprise. There were many issues to be faced, including:

• Global distribution becomes challenging, especially when shipping clothing because of the tariffs involved from county to county.
• Sizing of clothing is an issue because from country-to-country sizing charts are vastly different. Metric sizing, English sizing, and US sizing charts all vary.
• Business cards were a unique problem because of the Asian fonts being used on the Chinese cards. The standard templates and the PDF proofing could not support the Asian characters, creating an expensive translation problem for manual typesetting.
• Moog has many accounting cost centers throughout their company and each needed different billing requirements. Country-to-country billing and collections also become problematic.

The Solution

Drew & Rogers worked with the Moog team to develop a Virtual Ordering Solution and researched the products necessary to be successful and attractive across multiple cultures. Without Moog employees buying into the program, the storefront would have no appeal. Drew & Rogers’s team worked with Moog and our vendors to develop a single sizing chart for all countries involved in the apparel program portion of our solution.

After many go-arounds with the various buying areas of the Moog enterprise, we finally convinced the company to use purchasing cards for buying, and also incorporated cost center codes into the checkout procedures.

Finally, the biggest hurdle was freight and customs. We found that that we could ship domestically without any problem, and we used the Moog freight accounts for all domestic and European shipments. For Asian shipments, we shipped most of them from our suppliers in China or the Moog logistics division shipped our materials with the standard materials going to China on a regular basis. We are now more experienced with customs documentation, which  minimized customs delays.

The Result

The Moog Virtual Ordering Solution storefront has been a great success. We’ve helped Moog save money by aggregating purchases, helped protect branding from country to country for all cards and promotional products, and streamlined billing operations by migrating purchases to P-Cards. We even eliminated the business card translation requirements, so the Moog requester can now see the PDF proof generated by our solution right from their desktop.