News & Events
December 2008
Borders Shortlisted at Retail Week Awards with The Retail Suite
Itim announced the start of its project with Borders (UK) Ltd in February 2008. The Retail Suite has now been fully delivered in an astounding seven and a half months. The project has enabled Borders’ strategic objectives to be met - to replace all systems from their former US parent in a very tight schedule as well as shake up the new business and eliminate unnecessary costs. The Retail Suite was key to these efforts under three pillars of change:
Supply chain and stock holding
Borders’ inherited central distribution model was impacting margins. The Retail Suite enabled daily replenishment direct from suppliers. This addressed customer demand, made for a more responsive, cost-effective business, reduced stock by 20%, liberated cash and increased sales. Now, replenishment against 300,000 products across 41 stores is automated and runs daily, in minutes. EDI orders are now with suppliers within 20 minutes, and stores use HHTs to book in stock direct and create GRNs, which are centrally matched against invoices and their associated POs. The whole process is now automated and exception or algorithm based, requiring minimal clerical intervention.
Head Office process streamlining
UK business processes, all mirroring the former ‘USA way’, were completely reengineered. In particular, the Buying and Merchandising processes, for 300,000 stocked products and an extended in-print catalogue of over 3,000,000 titles, were untenably resource hungry. Three world-class, streamlined, workflow modules were created in response – Catalogue, ‘Front List’ Ordering, and ‘Back List’ Replenishment Management. These pull related product information together, enabling concurrent, common work on multiple products, and providing both micro-management and rules-based volume automation tools, in one application.
Systems independence & affordable managed service
To fulfil their independence objective, Borders had to meet an inflexible timeline, but within a stringent budget. Traditional ERP could meet the former, a component based solution the latter. Being fully .Net, web-based and hosted, The Retail Suite enabled cost effective, rapid configuration and development around new, best-for-Borders processes, and unprecedented implementation speed. The time/cost compromise was removed and the objective fulfilled - the timely delivery of a fully integrated, PCI certified, end-to-end solution to streamline core business processes, which would cut Borders’ costs.
The Retail Suite saved Borders 40% against their budget. Further, supplied on a monthly subscription basis, Borders did not incur capital costs, saving cash instead for other important initiatives.
The Retail Suite is the first Software-plus-Services, end-to-end solution for retail. Borders now benefits from the significant reduction in fixed annual costs that only this innovative delivery and payment mechanism can bring.
Even under normal expenditure terms Borders has achieved Return on Investment in less than one year - impressive considering the project has turned a cost of acquisition exercise into a self-funding programme that is now the foundation for future opportunities and improvements. In Software-plus-Services terms however, this initiative has truly enabled a benefit now, pay over time advantage. There are numerous ways in which to account this, but there is no hiding from the financial benefits. If simply taken over a five-year payment term, ROI has been delivered in just 2.34 months.
Simon Thomas - IT Director at Borders concludes. "We’re extremely impressed and the business can’t fail to be delighted with the results returned and the opportunities ahead of us. Our short-listing for Retail Week’s Technology Initiative of the Year is just further testament to the extraordinary success of this project"
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