QD Stores Group’s SAP Business All in One deployment will help the retailer keep one step of the competition and bolster its expansion programme.
The SAP implementation, aided by solutions and services provider Wincor Nixdorf, will go live in April. Currently, the retail Group has 38 stores, but plans to open another 12 new outlets by the end of the year. The company needed back-office software that could support this expansion, improve efficiency and enable better visibility of the business that could help buying decisions.
“We had a couple of systems that were bespoke. They were perfectly fine when we had 20 stores and there weren’t many people operating in this space, Now life’s tougher and we need to make more decisions and need more granularity of information,” explained Justin Farrington-Smith, managing director of QD Stores Group.
A major element of the implementation is the addition of SAP Business Objects Business Intelligence, which will enable the company to drill down deeper into its data to see which lines are performing well, for example.
“At the moment, when we pull a lever we don’t always know what the effect will be, but we’re hoping that the effect of the new software will be that when that leaver is pulled, we will be able to know the consequences. We do know that on a macro scale at the moment, but we can’t drill down to know which little things will help us improve our margins,” said Farrington-Smith.
One of the key improvements of the SAP software will be in stock control, moving the company from having a “reactive replenishment system” to a more agile, proactive set-up, leading to improved availability of products and ultimately improved margins.
Choosing a partner to help the transition to the new software was key. “We didn’t want to choose a company that would put this system in and leave us, we wanted a long-term relationship. We’ve been around for 25 years and plan to stick around another 25, so wanted a partner like Wincor Nixdorf that would not only give u s value for money but be around to help with upgrades,” said Farrington-Smith.
