Entigral’s TraxWare® to Address Gray Market Sale of High End Bats
November 10, 2015 – Raleigh, NC – Entigral Systems, Inc., an asset and inventory tracking company, announced today the deployment of an automated shipping and tracking system at DeMarini Sports to address gray market sales of their high end bats. DeMarini, located in Hillsboro, OR, a division of Wilson Sporting Goods, is the world’s leading manufacturer of high performance baseball, fastpitch, and slowpitch bats.
Gray marketers were undercutting legitimate DeMarini retailers with unauthorized discounted prices on DeMarini high performance bats so DeMarini turned to Entigral to address this issue. Entigral’s asset tracking solution, based on its highly scalable TraxWare software platform, was integrated into DeMarini’s unique manufacturing process to mark and serialize each bat using 2D barcoding and RFID tags. The bats are individually packaged and shipped to DeMarini authorized resellers. TraxWare automates the verification of each shipment, registering each bat to the designated recipient. As bats are found on the gray market, they are easily traced back to the original shipment and recipient. This provides DeMarini with complete visibility of the origin of its bats globally.
“The problem of gray market sales of DeMarini products is not just about margin erosion it is also about brand erosion for us and our valued retailers. It’s important for us to maintain the image of quality and integrity originally instilled by our founder Ray DeMarini,” said Nathan Baldwin, Plant Manager at DeMarini. “Entigral’s solution nips the problem in the bud, and because it integrated seamlessly within our current processes, deployment was quick and painless,” added Baldwin.
Entigral’s solution includes the use of 2D barcoding and RFID technology throughout the process. By deploying TraxWare with sensor technology, DeMarini is able to track and account for each of its bats. They have now brought their high performance bat manufacturing into the world of Smart Manufacturing and the Internet of Things.