ABOUT THE CUSTOMER:
Adidas and Reebok in Ghana are exclusively operated by Nutmeg Limited, their retailer and partner in the market.
They’ve been in the market for more than 10 years and serving more than 15,000 loyal customers with a wide collection of 40,000+ different items.
Since day one, they’ve put their customers’ service on top of their priorities. Currently, with 6 regional stores in Ghana, and a team of 50+ Employees, they are #1 sports retailer in the market with the highest Online and In-store satisfaction rate compared to any other competitors.
6 stores
40k items
15k customers
50 employees
300 daily orders
The challenges:
The pandemic was an opportunity for market leaders like Nutmeg - being the exclusive retailer of multinational brands like adidas and Reebok - to expand their operations, review their investments and exploit options to overcome its consequences.
On the first hand, the e-commerce demand has seen a remarkable growth which implied the urgent need of a scalable, user friendly and efficient e-commerce portal to service the brands’ community across Ghana. And on the other hand, they have concluded on the need to replace the existing ERP that will give them a better scalability and availability that will accompanies their expansion strategies.
The existing system was on premise application, including but not limited to the below challenges:
1. No visibility on the stores stock levels from a central application
2. Cannot be integrated with external e-commerce applications
3. Not scalable enough to manage the operation of additional stores
4. Customer database and transactions are not centralized at the head office but at the store level
5. Basic loyalty and engagement opportunities which limited the improvement of the customers’ service that has been envisioned and strategized.
THE solution:
Plennix met the stakeholders and listened to their operational bottlenecks, led the ROI analysis and exploited with their business users the added value of implementing Odoo14 on Odoo SH Cloud platform.
A detailed gap analysis and live POC were enough to get the buy-in and make all of us convinced that Odoo is the best fit for a full-fledge ERP system in order to run their B2B and B2C businesses back-to-back.
The solution embedded almost all Odoo application, including Sales, Purchase, Inventory, POS, Accounting, Website, e-Commerce, Email Marketing, Marketing Automation and a full HRMS.
The procurement application, integrated with the inventory and accounting applications, facilitated their procurement process and provided them a more accurate costing matrix and better visibility on goods tracking.
As for the Sales, the SALES-POS-ECOMMERCE Trio did their job perfectly. They started managing their B2B operation using the Sales application, and the POS for their IN-STORE Shopping. The e-commerce portal is being finalized and will allow them to fulfill orders to all Ghana.
The implementation supported a full mobile infrastructure. With the help of tables, PDA’s and Odoo IOTs, the salesmen were easily able to fetch products, check stock availability, prepare the orders, and print receipts while walking with their customers in the store. Fixed cashier stations will be fully removed shortly at adidas and Reebok stores in Ghana.
A lot of luxurious functionalities have been added to Odoo POS 14, to provide a top-notch in-store customer journey. These functionalities included:
1. Gift Vouchers directly from the POS that can be redeemed in any store
2. Central loyalty program that provides a lot benefits for the top customers
3. Return Vouchers
4. Integrating the POS with the tablet Cameras to scan and check barcodes. This is one of the latest R&D peeks at Plennix Technologies.
5. Customer feedback form
In addition to sales and procurement, Odoo is currently handling the internal operational workflows like Employee management, Payroll management, expenses, time-off, etc.
And for sure all these processes have been#integrated with the accounting application that is providing them central budgetary figures (P&L, Bank reconciliation, Income statement, General Ledger, Budget, cash flow) split by store, department, and brand.
From a customer perspective, with the help of SMS Marketing, Email marketing, and Marketing automation, we successfully met the stakeholder's expectations. The engagement rate after Odoo’s implementation has remarkably increased. Not to forget that many of the paper processes have gone paperless and the human mistakes dropped to the minimum.
EXECUTION – THE STORY BEHIND THE “72 HOURS IMPLEMENTATION”:
As a leading gold partner, it’s a pride for us to handle and deliver similar projects. It adds a lot to our product and customer portfolios.
But nonetheless, we always seek challenges and records that we can break! This pushes us to achieve higher and more.
For this project, one of the key challenges was the fact that the whole migration between ERPs and the Go-live should happen in 72 hours without any downtime.
We accepted this challenge, listed our risks assumptions, tested our staging scenarios and got another nap awaiting the Green light!
Senior project manager, Senior Implementer, Technical lead, Senior developer and 2 junior developers have been allocated with the highest preparedness and alertness. We were ready for the worst-case scenarios that may oblige us to roll back the implementation.
6 Stores, 40K+ SKUs, 50 Employees, 15K+ Customers, Average of 300 Orders daily, 0 downtime allowed. These were few out of many facts that we had to fulfill for a successful implementation.
And since the stock count process cannot be done while the operation is ongoing, for 3 consecutive days during the implementation, we had to wait for the stores to close, count the stock of an average of 2 stores daily, and implement overnight.
The very next day, we were running to parallel activities: Training the live stores users on the spot, and preparing for the upcoming 2 stores.
Adrenaline level was so high, and so was the customer’s satisfaction level. The whole plan has been executed as expected and thankfully we didn’t face any unexpected risk.
Thumbs up, smiles on the users and customers experiencing their new shopping experience using Odoo and the showing satisfaction paid off our tiredness.
Isn’t Odoo magical? It could incredibly integrates in such a complicated business without the need of applying major customizations.