Many retail businesses are challenged to responding quickly to changing consumer demands while balancing internal control, increased margins and profitability. An end-to-end view of the business then becomes imperative to help retailers to focus on connecting with customers and delivering a complete, personalized shopping experience across all channels.
Such is the same case for this leading retail company that after nearly forty years of operation, it has expanded its business throughout Canada to become an easily recognizable brand. Along with its growth came several business challenges on inventory management, vendor incentives and security.
The Challenge
As with all retail organizations, inventory control is a crucial part of the business process. Timely and accurate inventory levels, detailed count procedures, seamless transfer requisitions and precise costing are essential. The existing inventory process was slow and prone to error causing a ripple effect into their costing which is their life blood.
They also started having issues around their vendor programs—a combination of vendor incentives, price protection and volume incentive rebates. The old system was build off from a series of patched codes which accumulated over the years but failed to scale with the business. With the large volumes of transactions and vendors to manage, it caused the internal processes to become inefficient. Without the necessary automation in place, this process was falling apart and millions of dollars were at stake.
Security had not been reviewed over the last ten years, as such many users were running with everything “wide open”. Identifying and controlling security was essential to ensure that the users have the correct permissions based on their roles and the processes that they are handling.
The Solution
This retailer chose Systema Solutions to upgrade first their existing Microsoft Dynamics NAV from 5.0 to 2016 so they can take advantage of the productivity gains from the new enhanced version. New financial functionality (deferrals, posting preview and positive pay, reporting enhancements), improved document management, same user experience across a broad range of devices and web client enhancements are just some of the features they can now enjoy with Dynamics NAV 2016.
Systema tackled the problem around managing inventory by providing a real-time integration to their point of sale system through Sync Partner Framework (SPF). SPF is a ready-made solution developed by Systema for integrating NAV to practically almost all types of systems to make the integration easy and seamless.
The integration provided on time and responsive inventory levels and costing. At the same time, they adapted and enhanced the processes around inventory control. The security of the newly upgraded enterprise resource planning (ERP) was also tightened by identifying the user roles and the permissions associated to each role.
Systema was chosen for this project due to its industry expertise implementing ERPs and POS. Stakeholders had confidence in their abilities and it showed through the successful project rollout.
The Results
In less than six months of work, this retailer has gained visibility across its business and has significantly improved their customers’ shopping experience.
The company saved thousands of man-hours each month from improving the vendor program process alone. Combining NAV 2016 with the Vendor Program, it increased their posting performance by 800%. What used to take 24 hours to post now happens in real time. The staff also realized performance improvements by 30% in terms of reporting as NAV allows them to instantly drill down on the information that they need.
Dynamics NAV with Systema’s SPF implemented to the Vendor Program brought a single intuitive set of functionality built for the retail operations saving them time and the hassle of missed billings.
Contact Us
Would you like your business to reap the same immense results? Whether you’re an existing Dynamics NAV user looking to upgrade or customize or has no ERP in place at all, we can create an advice that is unique to your situation. Contact us today for a free business consultation!