Trading company "Partner" unites retail chains of various formats. At the time of the decision to introduce a new information management system, among them were 7 Mosmart hypermarkets, 13 supermarkets and Pchelka convenience stores.
All stores are located in Tyumen and the Tyumen region, offering a wide selection of food and related products. In the spring of 2012, "Partner" entered into a franchise agreement with the well-known international network SPAR and has already opened several hypermarkets under it. It is planned that in 2015 all grocery retail stores that are part of the Tyumen holding will operate under this European brand.
The planned reorganization of the network determined the tasks of optimizing the current information system of the Partner company. In fact, the holding needed to organize the work of existing retail stores and new hypermarkets in one ERP solution. As a result of the tender, the holding management chose Odyssey Food Retail and Odyssey WMS based on Microsoft Dynamics AX.
total cost of ownership of a new system. The solution on the Microsoft Dynamics AX platform fully met our expectations in terms of price and quality ratio. Definitely an important factor was the deep industry expertise of the integrator. The Odyssey Consulting Group team successfully cooperates with a number of retail and distribution companies around the world, including the SPAR grocery network, and has good feedback from customers. Taking into account the challenges we faced as part of the development strategy, the integrator’s solution seemed to us the most preferable”, says Nikolay Bulashev, Head of the IT Department of the Partner Holding.
The Odyssey Food Retail solution, developed by the specialists of a consulting company on the Microsoft Dynamics AX platform, supported the main processes grocery retail network: assortment management, pricing and sales, procurement planning, settlements with suppliers, logistics operations, operation of a warehouse complex, maintenance of own production.
» affected the areas of management purchases and store logistics. The system implemented functions related to the goods acceptance process, including control of delivery conditions and purchase prices, processing of overdeliveries and underdeliveries in stores, registration of discrepancies and returns. The Odyssey Food Retail toolkit for conducting purchasing activities allowed us to speed up the creation of orders to suppliers, control the accuracy of their execution, plan payment schedules taking into account delivery dates and terms of contracts.
“We have almost completely changed the processes associated with stock management and store replenishment. Planning and managing orders is carried out according to store formats, taking into account the sales forecast of the product and its analogues, accepted schedules of orders and suppliers, display size in stores, current balances and their expiration dates, safety stocks, promotions, seasonality factors”, – comment in the holding.
Odyssey Food Retail allows the company to take into account the needs of an individual store, as well as analyze the needs of the entire chain, by placing an order at the distribution center level in accordance with the accepted replenishment algorithm. Orders are carried out both in the context of separate items and product categories, and in the form of sets of items, for vegetables, for example, taking into account their shelf life and shelf life.
"In contrast from the standard functionality of Odyssey ERP systems Food Retail allowed the company to build forecasts of consumer demand not only by the moving average method, but also taking into account the trends of weekly and annual seasonality”, – Director of the Food Retail practice of the consulting company Odyssey Consulting Group.
At the time of implementation, the trading company was unable to conduct full party account. Information about how many goods of which supplier are in store balances, how many, according to what invoices and with what delay period a particular chain owes the supplier to the supplier, and how much goods has already been sold, could be incomplete or unreliable. Odyssey Food Retail supports strict accounting of goods movement in the context of contracts and conditions of suppliers for all stores. “By the time when the due date for payment of the invoice comes up, we calculate the percentage of sales of the goods in comparison with the planned indicators. Thus, the system's tools help us identify miscalculations in purchases, minimize possible financial losses”, – specifies Nikolay Bulashev, Head of the IT Department of Partner Holding.
The Odyssey Food Retail Procurement Toolkit accelerated the creation of orders to suppliers, allowed to control the accuracy of their fulfillment, plan payment schedules, taking into account delivery times and terms of contracts. Document flow with partners following the results of the project is fully automated and centralized, including using EDI tools.
"We organized work with several providers, increased the number of EDI messages", - confirms Nikolay Bulashev. – “The procedure for reconciliation of settlements with suppliers now takes no more than 1-3 days.”
Pricing is managed centrally at the format level nbsp;"Odyssey WMS solution based on Microsoft Dynamics AX controls all processes of the reconstructed distribution center of the holding "Partner" from the receipt and placement of goods to the selection and control of shipment to retail stores. Automation of the distribution center will allow the company to reduce the time it takes for goods to arrive on store shelves, control the shelf life of products, and increase throughput warehouse capacity".
Pallet storage is used in the warehouse, goods are processed in two ways. In the first case, each application corresponds to a separate invoice, but the supplier can combine five or more such applications on one pallet at once. The Odyssey WMS solution provides accelerated consolidated acceptance of the entire cargo. In another case, one application of the supplier corresponds to several expenditure requests of stores. For these purposes, goods are accepted by the piece or in places and during the acceptance process distributed to retail outlets, whether they are hypermarkets or convenience stores.
product categories by expiration dates, which contributes to the optimal loading of warehouse space. In addition, Odyssey WMS the shoulder of shipment of orders is configured depending on the requirements of the store. During the acceptance of goods, the availability of certificates for each item in the batch is monitored, in the required number of copies for all stores. In the event that a certificate is issued for a certain period, the system allows you to track its validity period in the process of accepting a new batch. Full and partial inventory tools allow the trading company to reduce the number of accounting errors for incoming products.
In addition to the central distribution warehouse, the company operates a transshipment warehouse for fruits and vegetables, the operation of which is provided by the Odyssey Food Retail ERP solution. Vegetables and fruits have a short shelf life, so that the replenishment of all stores is carried out several times a day. The solution supports standard cross-docking operations, speeding up the distribution of goods from a warehouse to stores, helps to track overdeliveries and underdeliveries, ensure regulated commodity stocks, taking into account their shelf life and shelf life, carry out markdowns and revaluation of products based on the results of sorting and culling, identifying deviations in weight and etc.
As part of the project, "Partner" provided tasks related to accounting for finished products of own production. “Production accounting in the previous ERP system was poorly established, balances were kept only on the basis of sales statistics. We knew it, how many products were produced, how many were sold, but could not take into account the internal movement of goods between stores. According to the results of the inventory, we could not determine the sources of losses, surpluses and shortages. With the launch of a solution based on Microsoft Dynamics AX, we received the necessary control tools, delimited responsibility between production units and the actual stores
There are several production workshops in the holding's hypermarkets and supermarkets, including a bakery, a hot and salad workshop, meat and fish cutting workshops. In convenience stores, only the grill is sold. Odyssey Food Retail allows you to determine the need of stores in orders for their own products, set standards for the consumption of raw materials, maintain recipes with an unlimited number of nesting ingredients, take into account finished products in these ingredients, and also calculate the cost of products based on the actual output. “In the field of production accounting, there are certain difficulties associated with the adaptation of personnel to the system. There are a lot of tools in the solution, line personnel are not yet completely mastered and often makes mistakes, but we are working on their training”, specifies Nikolay Bulashev.
Trading holding "Partner" has not just combined several solutions into a single system, but can get a complete picture of the state of the entire chain of stores in within one report. “The Columbus Food Retail solution also includes a preconfigured OLAP reporting package based on Microsoft SQL Server. With its help, the heads of a trading holding can receive real-time data on daily sales of stores in close to real time mode, specialists of Odyssey Consulting Group note.
System helps to calculate the volume of trade, indicators marginality and inventory turnover in various sections, to conduct a plan-fact analysis of sales for a specific period. In terms of interaction with suppliers, it is possible to assess the quality and compliance with the delivery schedule, maintain reporting on losses, write-offs and losses, including separately for brands and promotional goods, more accurately assess receivables and payables. The solution also provides reporting on production orders and sales of own products.
The operating system is integrated with the system for managing the Odyssey WMS distribution warehouse, data collection terminals in shops, POS-system and accounting system. With the help of data collection terminals, all logistics operations with goods in stores can be performed twice as fast.
Nikolay Bulashev, Head of the IT Department of the Partner Holding: «I would like to note the good scalability of the Odyssey Food Retail solution. In the old system, we regularly ran into performance issues. Now there are no problems, although the number of users of the system has increased 4 times. Almost every Odyssey Food Retail module contains many new features that differ from the standard functionality of Microsoft Dynamics AX. We have already appreciated the benefits of their use in assortment and retail price management, in purchasing and control of settlements with suppliers. I will also note the professionalism of Odyssey Consulting Group in the field of project management: even in difficult periods, our
