The international grocery chain SPAR has been operating in the Russian market since the early 2000s. There are now over 300 SPAR retail stores of various formats in Russia, all operating under a franchise system. ZAO "SPAR Retail" is one of the largest SPAR franchise partners in the country. The company has 28 supermarkets in Moscow, Moscow region and Vladimir. SPAR Retail uses the industry solution Odyssey Food Retail based on Microsoft Dynamics AX to manage its retail network. The system was launched in the industrial company relatively recently, and replaced the "zoo" of several outdated information systems, including Microsoft Dynamics AX 3.0. Odyssey Consulting Group acted as the partner of the new ERP-system implementation project. SPAR Retail switched to the new information management system in order to ensure further growth of the network.
The previous industry solution based on Microsoft Dynamics AX 3.0 was heavily modified and had extremely low performance. It was getting to the point where some regular operations were only performed by the retailer's employees in the evenings, including weekends.
Our goals were to launch a unified information system for all branches and legal entities of the company, unify business processes, and come to a unified corporate policy in the field of management, accounting and tax accounting. The focus was on automating the processes of pricing and assortment management, treasury operations, internal logistics and production accounting
Our goals were to launch a unified information system for all branches and legal entities of the company, unify business processes, come to a unified corporate policy in the field of management, accounting and tax accounting. Odyssey Food Retail solution supports key areas of SPAR Retail operations: assortment management, pricing and sales, treasury operations, internal logistics and production accounting. ERP is integrated with POS- and WMS-systems, HR accounting and payroll system, as well as SPARMobile terminal control system. The new ERP system has over 300 users.
"Convenience, the system functionality, support availability are the main reasons why we chose the Odyssey Consulting Group solution based on Microsoft Dynamics AX. The employees were already working with the system, albeit in an older version, understood its logic, adapted to its features," - says Mikhail Krasavin. - "Some unique processes we carried over from the previous solution and fine-tuned for the new business conditions. Convenience, functionality of the system, and accessibility of support - the main reasons why we chose the Odyssey Consulting Group solution based on Microsoft Dynamics AX. The employees were already working with the system, albeit in an older version, understood its logic, adapted to its features.
Fixed or promotional prices can also be defined in the system for individual outlets or store formats, for example, for certain days. Integration with the cash register management system allows you to quickly get the data of cash receipts and reports for each outlet. This allows the company to quickly assess whether an individual store and the network as a whole can fulfill its sales plan for each product category. The assortment of SPAR Retail CJSC is about 18 thousand items, more than a third of them are own-produced products. SPAR stores have production shops that produce salads, hot meals, and baked goods.
One of the retailer's "headaches" is the accounting of finished goods in semi-finished products and raw materials. So, the solution Odyssey Food Retail, which includes tools for managing their own production, was just in time. The system is used to keep receipts, record finished products and expenditure of raw materials in ingredients. It is possible to calculate the cost of finished goods, prices for sale, manage operations of cutting and unpacking, and move semi-finished and finished products through the store chain in Odyssey Food Retail. Automatic deboning is important for the production of ready-to-cook and ready-to-eat meat and poultry products. The cost of cutting results is determined by the coefficients which are set by the company's employees on the level of specifications. The Odyssey Food Retail logistics loop covers purchasing activity, settlements with suppliers, inventory management.
The solution supports various supply schemes: direct, through the distribution center, intra-holding resale. In addition, the employees of SPAR Retail CJSC perform full accounting in the system in accordance with current legislation. An important part of the project was automation of settlements with suppliers. In particular, the solution helps to keep purchase orders, assign and monitor compliance with the terms of payment for each delivery. The system has an advanced acceptance procedure. When goods arrive at the warehouse, employees quickly check whether the delivery schedule is adhered to, whether the volumes and prices of products agreed upon with the partner in advance correspond to those actually received, and whether there are discrepancies between the received order and those specified in the documents. An employee of the chain cannot accept the goods if the terms of delivery are violated, for example, if the price exceeds the agreed amount or if more goods are received than specified in the application of the store.
Odyssey Food Retail supports handling of oversupply and undeliveries, handling returns. Defective goods or expired food products are automatically excluded from the store's stock. EDI is used for processing and confirmation of orders. Odyssey Food Retail supports credit and loan accounting (interest calculation on loans), accounting of accountable persons, material and service accounting, fixed assets and intangible assets, deferred expenses accounting, input and output VAT accounting with preparation of the primary documents. Odyssey Consulting Group solution plans and monitors cash flows for all retailer's trade operations, helps to manage accounts payable and receivable.
During implementation, the management team has changed several times, which affected the approach to organizing individual processes and objectives of the introduction as a whole. In fact, not having yet had time to launch and reap the first benefits of the system, we were redoing many business processes and reconfiguring them in the solution. However, we reached the main goal of the project: now the entire business operations are implemented in one system based on Microsoft Dynamics AX. I should note that the Odyssey Consulting Group team proved to be a responsible partner who was interested in the successful result of the implementation and was able to see the project through to its completion
