A $1B retailer makes the move to unified commerce

Overview

A multi-brand, multi-channel retailer with revenues of $1B brought in RSM to help replace aging legacy systems and move toward unified commerce with Microsoft Dynamics 365. This retailer goes to market primarily through e-commerce, with an online shop for each brand, but they also have outlet and showroom stores that improve the brands’ strengths and their customers’ confidence in purchasing. The retailer’s roots are in the catalog channel, which is still active though no longer used as a primary driver of revenue.

Challenges

The retailer recognized the growing need for an omnichannel experience and the added value of having brick-and-mortar showrooms to support their e-commerce business. Existing data analytics by the retailer showed that average order values—as well as the demand placed on the e-commerce website—increased in areas where a brick-and-mortar store was present.

The retailer decided to pursue a unified customer experience regardless of the channel used by customers, including brick-and-mortar, e-commerce and catalog. The retailer had several aging systems in use by distinct brands and supported by a small IT team. The legacy software had also reached its upper limit of brick-and-mortar scalability, which was slowing the retailer’s growth down. By getting all of its brands on a common platform, the retailer hoped to improve its levels of service and deliver better quality.

Solution

The retailer brought in RSM, and the team outlined a plan to advance the retailer’s goals, move toward unified commerce and initiate a multi-phase approach to convert each brand. The new plan involved integrating the existing e-commerce and WMS solutions and replacing the OMS, POS and financial systems. RSM and the retailer also worked to implement electronic data interchange (EDI) to replace the retailer’s aging vendor portal.

The technology of an implementation is often the easy part. The hard—and typically overlooked—part is managing the people and users impacted by the change. Due to the age of this retailer’s systems and length of time since making major technological or organizational changes, the retailer hired RSM’s Organizational Change Management team to supplement and coach their own internal OCM team. This improved the retailer’s ability to absorb change and adopt new processes.

RSM also brought in a special team to help implement and train the retailer on new enterprise middleware, due to the number and scale of the integrations. This helped the retailer leverage the middleware for other integrations—such as ServiceNow—that they were able to implement on their own, as well as improve the agility of the IT organization. The benefits stacked up across the board, adding value again and again for the retailer in unexpected places.

Unified commerce capabilities and results

After understanding the customers’ needs, infrastructure and culture, the following capabilities were prioritized for the project:

• An omnichannel experience that allows customers to receive the same shopping experience regardless of channel
• Improved technological scalability that facilitates further growth and strategy
• The ability to roll out to unlimited brick-and-mortar locations, which internal analysis has shown increases order volumes and average order value in areas with a showroom
• Having a way to communicate to customers available to promise dates through tighter integration with EDI providers
• Improved resource scalability through common shared services working across multiple brands in the same software, reducing the need for IT and call center teams for each brand
   

What happens next?

Every retailer is unique. Your company’s starting point may be different from the one described here. But even if your company is not yet ready to embark on a unified commerce journey, you can still start by creating a plan. Connect with our team if you would like assistance with preparing a business case for your project.