Retail
Retail
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Preparing for the International Trade
The client is a multinational pharmacy retailer. The pharmacy chain employs 7,500+ people and operates 650+ stores across Australia and New Zealand, and is branching out into the EU with its first store in Ireland. The firm has often been compared with the global QSR giants as their equivalent in pharmacy because of the scale of its operations.
The firm’s USP is its ability to provide competitive prices through large sales volumes. Its objective, to enhance healthcare outcomes via the most effective and efficient means – providing care and high savings to the patient. To this end, the company sought complete digital integration in its retail operations, a need that gained urgency as a result of lockdowns and pandemic-induced changes in shopping behaviour. The company also needed to ensure that its systems would adapt to its fast growth rates and expansion plans, both across sales channels and across countries. With the increased emphasis on online shopping, the system needed to be able to provide a welcoming customer experience. And finally, since the company’s main line of business medicines and drugs, its systems needed to ensure that laws and guidelines governing prescription sales were adhered to.
Problem Statement
In 2020, The firm had planned to expand into Ireland, using its European tilt as a springboard to shift from discrete, on-premise business systems to a globally supported cloud-based platform. According to the CIO of the firm, the transition was a critical component of their plans. “This transformation will ensure all of our international franchises will operate on one platform, solving a lot of operational barriers. It will allow us to consistently manage and maintain various systems across the world using best practice infrastructure with greater availability, scalability, and cost-effectiveness than our on-premise solution could afford us,” says the CIO.
To provide the best possible support, Sonata, through its Australian arm Sonata Scalable, drew on its deep pool of experience with Microsoft Dynamics, and its own involvement in product engineering with Microsoft, to provide an optimal solution
A Personalized Solution
Full-blown Dynamics 365 solution offering
- Region specific dispensing systems
- Localized currency and tax-coding support
- B2b interaction management
- Supply chain and logistics optimization
- Corporate, individual and franchise billing
- Back-office operations
Customer Experience Management (Mission Happiness)
- True omnichannel retail experience
- Order tracking
- Delivery transparency
- Bespoke solution development, using PowerApps
- Point of sale systems for in-store ordering
- Store planning
- Catalogue management
Adapting to Growth
For the retail chain’s technical team, shifting to the cloud frees them up to focus on the company’s expansion plans. “If I go into a new country, the last thing I need to do is purchase hardware, set up servers, and provide services that way. I can just consume them,” the CIO of the firm says.
“By choosing to adopt a modern, cloud-based approach, the company must either rewrite their applications or adopt a new standard and deploy that. Running with a long-term strategic initiative demonstrated enormous trust in Microsoft and Sonata Scalable," says Brett Crew, VP Sonata Australia, and CEO & Founder, Scalable.
A quest to improve efficiency and customer experience(CX)
The client is into designing and manufacturing beds. The company offers customers personalized sleep solutions and services. As of 2021, the company had a turnover of close to US $ 1.8 billion, with 600 + stores and over 5,000 employees in North America. The company’s mission is to improve lives by improving sleep.
The bedding retailer is at the leading edge of sleep science, holding multiple patents for bed types and sleeping accessories. But over the course of the past few decades, their inventory tracking system had not kept up with advances in technology and was unable to provide the kind of insights required for optimal management of supply chains and order tracking. There were also multiple systems at different levels of the organization performing the same tasks, and these systems did not always communicate well with each other. Several of their systems were dependent on manual tracking, which created further issues with efficiency. In addition, the company wanted to improve customer experience with a best-in-class customer experience platform.
Problem Statement
The company needed to improve touchpoint experiences – both for customers and suppliers. It needed a comprehensive and integrated system that would improve engagement and collaboration with suppliers. They also needed to provide visibility to the links of the supply chain to help customers get clarity on the movement of stock-keeping units (SKUs) and the availability of products at their stores. They further needed to minimize the use of manual systems to improve process efficiency. And finally, they needed to instrument the final integrated system with telemetry tools to provide them the insights they required into customer and supplier behaviors, as well as process inefficiencies.
An Intelligent Solution
Solution Components
- Self-service portal
- Updated CRM Platform
- Digitized safety systems
- Dedicated supplier portal
- Content management
- Demand planning
Microsoft-based systems
- Power Apps
- Power BI
- Power Automation
- Azure
- Dynamics 365 CE
Intelligence for success
The systems implemented by Sonata Connected Retail provided the Comfortaire bed retailer with the information and intelligence that they were missing out on earlier. Self-service supplier portals and a top-of-the-line CRM platform provided them with the intelligence they needed to improve their supply chains and customer experience. The telemetry built into these systems helps them make better, and more informed decisions about the business itself.
The client is a multinational fashion & apparel retail chain. It has a chain of 2800+ stores with a presence across 20,000+ multi-brand outlets with 6,300+ points of sales in retail stores of various formats.
The firm is envisioning a future-ready digital platform for its brands, one which provides a single view of customer and inventory across all channels. The platform will be the single source of truth and data integrity to provide a best-in-class omnichannel experience which in turn will help in creating a better customer experience.
The Fashion Leader was looking for a digital transformation for their retail operations. The need intensified as a result of the Covid pandemic. They chose Dynamics 365 as a solution, while continuing to use SAP for their backend data. The D365 front end helped them look different aspects of their processes helped them streamline commerce, Order management system(OMS), loyalty and clienteling.
The idea was to move from a home-grown solution to a Dynamics 365 based holistic solution.
Problem Statement
The firm has multiple 3rd party and home-grown solutions to facilitate order management, customer management and loyalty. This resulted in disparity of data across their multiple channels of stores, brand sites and the marketplace. They wanted to achieve customer and price parity across channels with implementation of omnichannel functionality to offer consistent, frictionless engagement across online and offline channels.
They were also looking to enhance their customer experience with digital ready client-management solutions to engage with customers, replacing their current loyalty system to provide a comprehensive loyalty program across channels and the Mission Happiness program to gather customer feedback.
Sonata conducted a workshop with the client which helped them map their requirements on to Dynamics 365 Commerce for managing omnichannel capabilities, including order management, client management and loyalty solutions. Dynamics 365 CRM was used for the Mission Happiness program.
A Personalized Solution
We were able to help our client with the following:
Commerce Solution
- Replaced their home-grown Product Information Management (PIM) system with a unified solution on Dynamics PIM which could cater to all channels- store, ecommerce & mobile
- Replaced their current order management system which was becoming very difficult to maintain. Modified Sterling Commerce with Dynamics DOM solution.
- Offered solutions for multiple delivery methods to become omnichannel with the likes of BORIS, BOPIS, BOSS, etc
- Helped them become hyperlocal, giving customers an experience of the store online through showcasing of inventory, store pricing & product catalogues online.
Customer Experience Management (Mission Happiness)
- Capture customer feedback at different points to provide a wholesome customer experience. This was achieved by extending the mobile app & integrating it with CE CRM.
- Helped move their loyalty from a 3rd party onto Dynamics system, which eased integration & enhanced user friendliness.
- Client management to effectively manage the customer when from walks in onwards.
- Advanced data analytics for customer insights, reporting, etc.
The Sonata Edge
- Our expertise in retail which helped in understanding client’s challenges and mapping their needs to the unified digital platform
- Our experience in Dynamics with similar clients helped provide a consultative approach, leading to standardized processes and procedures during implementation