Retail Industry
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Title
Well call this project the "Faversham Furniture Retailer" project to protect our real customers identity. We have created a demo client filled with configuration to demonstrate the implementation.
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Industry
Retail Industry: The client is a well respected name having operated in the Furniture Retail industry in the South East of England for a number of generations. The client is looking to expand their operation and acquire new locations.
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Geography
The client is based in the South East of England - Kent.
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Company Profile
This is a family run business that has existed for a number of generations with around 20 employees. The main issues that we discussed when first meeting the client was their inability for their till software to handle some of the unique things they required in their area of retail. Specifically, these were:
- Back ordering to specification - a demo product would be in stock bu the customer required another colour or specific configuration for their purpose. We need to capture the product options and then back order the product
- Selling of carpets - hence their existing system had no stock of carpets
- VAT exemption - some products have different rates of VAT applied at the point of sale depending on the purpose. A special tax declaration is required to be completed upon at which stage the system needs to be able to reduce the VAT rate and calculate it correctly from a retail price list
- Third Party Credit - some items are sold on special interest free terms. These are actually credit provider sales where the customer is invoiced for the deposit and the credit provider is invoiced for the balance.
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Opportunities
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Risks
Initially a scoping project was undertaken with the client to define the first stage and investigate risks.
Some of the risks included:
- As we were replacing an existing proprietary POS system, there was a chance that the incumbent POS supplier might not co-operate with the data migration of products, customers and sales from the existing Firebird database. We were able to connect to the database server and recover the master password and then examine the data schemas. Some Forensic work was required to identify where certain data was stored, but once this was done data migration was relatively simple.
- There were a large number of carpet department products that are not on any system. This required a large amount of data input and the person available to do the data input was also heavily involved in other areas of the roll-out.
- There was an acceptance risk due to the fact that the POS system had failed to meet expectations and still have a number of bugs that prevented it fully replacing the old manual cash registers (which were still partially in use alongside the incumbent POS system) This meant that there was skepticism from sales staff that the new system would be any better.
- FUD Brigade - we engaged with all existing IT providers of the client (except the POS providers) so that they would be part of the project. The hardware suppliers however, were unable to source our servers only having access to the latest and greatest and the web hosting company felt that they had been short changed out of building such an erp system from the ground up. The web designers made sure that the MD was aware that all open source is written by script kiddies and was not something to run your business on (despite the fact they used entirely open source software to run their web hosting business). We had already prototyped a solution with the client and they had seen the system in operation so this was ineffective.
- We tried outsourcing some of the work on this project and this didn't work very well because the supplier had other work that took priority over our job and we didn't have any history of working together in this way. This was exacerbated by the fact that one of the key staff was schedule to take a holiday and that left less experienced staff to manage the outsource.
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Implementation Modules
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Phase I
- Centralised Purchasing
- Multi - Warehouse Management / Replenishment
- Sales Order - Invoice
- Carpet Selling
- Online UK Post code lookup
- Cash reconciliation
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Phase II
- Requests
- Web Stores (Multiple) - for regular website, discount items (white label), micro sites by product category
- Operational KPI's
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Phase III
- Accounting
- Accounts Payable (COGS Purchases and Overheads)
- VAT Return / Reporting
- Bank
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Possible Future Work
- Fixed Assets
- Payroll
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Special Highlights
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Special Functionality
- Ability to have third party payments - for interest free credit / credit providers
- UK Post code lookups
- Price list including VAT - works for VAT free sales (order/invoices)
- Much customisation of roles using table, column and row level data permissions
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Lessons
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