Retail competitiveness

The High Street has never been more competitive. Alongside the challenge of growing sales revenues, maintaining profitability and controlling cash flow, new opportunities and threats continue to emerge. With the inexorable rise of internet shopping, the rise of the ‘app’ and the pervasiveness of social media, retailers are having to rethink multichannel strategies, customer social engagement and operational processes.

Our work with retailers spans the entire value chain, from merchandising, inventory management and distribution through to website and ecommerce solutions, from customer relationship management to forecasting, KPI reporting and business intelligence.

The case studies on the right illustrate the range of projects we have delivered.

Ann Summers

Ann Summer’s sells through 130 high street stores, online, and a network of self-employed party planners across the UK.

To create effective sales promotions, Ann Summers needed to understand existing sales patterns and the success of previous promotions. Their retail management system contains a large amount of customer purchase data, but deriving useful information from the system is very difficult.

DB Consulting created a new database, consolodating data from existing Oracle and SQL Server systems, and delivered a business intelligence solution across Retail, e-commerce and Party Plan channels.

Past promotions can now easily be analysed and new targeted campaigns created.

Dunhill

Alfred Dunhill is an international business with complex logistics systems. Dunhill’s ageing systems were becoming increasingly fragmented, and in 2009 the IT team embarked on a programme to ensure appropriate system support going foward.

DB Consulting was engaged to lead the process of selecting and engaging an ERP vendor. We defined the detailed requirements, managed the ‘beauty parade’, facilitated vendor demos and Q&A, and guided Dunhills business sponsors through the selection process. We then ran the implementation project, coordinating vendor activities through configuration, testing and development.

High Street Retailer

This innovative retailer operates a unique business model based on a combination of opportunistic buying and no-frills stores. Managing direct relationships with thousands of suppliers worldwide demands a highly complex planning and logistics operation. The challenge for DB Consulting was to develop a suite of bespoke, integrated .NET Silverlight applications to support business growth, particularly in the areas of Merchandising and Buying.

Working at pace, we established a ’product backlog’ and initiated a rolling programme of application delivery. The agile approach has allowed users to continue with day-to-day tasks whilst being able to contribute to the incremental delivery of new systems and enhancements.