Challenge
During a period of significant growth and with plans of expansion on the horizon, an international retail company found their point of sale (POS) and logistics systems couldn't scale with their company or even keep up with day-to-day operations. System crashes caused lengthy downtimes with their register systems while delays in data transmission and poor system integration capabilities caused inaccessible and incomplete information in the stores.
Not only did this put their strategic growth plans on hold and block their ability to open new stores across the nation, but Black Friday and the holiday shopping season was rapidly approaching. Company leadership was concerned about significant interruptions, downtime, and outages would affect their most profitable time of the year.
The retail chain knew they needed to move away from a monolithic, legacy system and chose to adopt Microsoft Dynamics ERP, an enterprise resource planning (ERP) system to align their systems and data. They planned for this to improve operations and productivity at the store level while increasing access to valuable data at the corporate level. However, poor implementation by a third party left them struggling to maximize the platform's functionality and leverage its features to serve their company.
Frustrated with the problems they faced, they turned to New Era Technology to assist them with properly implementing Dynamics ERP and were confident we could collaborate and achieve the best results.
Solution
When Dynamics ERP is implemented with best practices in place, it can be a powerful tool for driving optimal performance, accelerating operations, and supporting business agility. We knew that once their platform was optimized with their systems, processes, and data connected, it would provide the business intelligence and adaptability they needed.
Our team began by implementing Microsoft best practices to ensure the platform was stable, and then moved on to tackling several projects to customize the system to improve speed, minimize outages, and improve scalability. These included:
- A new loyalty program and gift cards
- Updating how data is captured, transferred, and stored each night to ensure accurate inventory the following day
- Re-writing the nightly processes for POS data to include sales numbers, customer data, and employee information into the BMS
- Configuring proper systems for business processes, including architecture
- Implementing JDA supply chain software
- Integrating multiple websites
- Implementing Azure Data Factory to facilitate data movement
As we rolled this out, our client experienced immediate success. We continued to work with them to incorporate their "stores-within-stores" properties and their data into their nightly process by engineering third-party feeds into their existing process and systems.
