“Unified commerce” appears to be as much of a buzzword as an actual concept in retail. But two very different brands have illustrated that improving product visibility can enhance a retailer’s ability to create better experiences across all channels.
Toad & Co., an apparel retailer with two brick-and-mortar locations in Maine and Oregon, an e-Commerce site and a catalog, also functions as a B2B business, selling products through third-party retailers. With the Oracle NetSuite cloud ERP platform, Toad & Co. has cut the time dedicated to financial analysis and reporting 40%. Additionally, the brand can better allocate inventory between its B2B and B2C businesses, which is vital since partner retailers often place orders in advance.
{loadpositon GIAA}“The ability to have our budgets fully incorporated in real-time data allows the executives of the company to look at how we’re tracking, whether that’s from a revenue standpoint, an expense standpoint, cost-of-goods, etc.,” said Kelly Milazzo, Director of Operations at Toad & Co. in an interview with Retail TouchPoints. “Within NetSuite, there’s workflows and exception reporting, so employees don’t have to sort through a whole report to find out where an issue may be. They can instead say, ‘alert me, or remind me if this happens.’ From the user to the executive level, that means huge efficiencies in that area.”
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The retailer’s employees now spend more time forecasting the business and looking ahead instead of micromanaging the day-to-day financials.
“At this point, our forecasting and our forward outlook is more accurate and detailed than it has been in the past,” Milazzo said.
The Toad & Co. team worked with NetSuite’s Retail Apparel Vertical Initiative (RAVI) team to implement the platform, train its employees, and gain best practices for using NetSuite. The RAVI team introduced an order management grid within NetSuite that enables the team to fill complex orders with several matrix elements, such as size, color, fabric and style. This grid enables users to easily enter orders for multiple like items, and view inventory and pricing information without having to scroll through individual SKUs.
Duck Store Unifies Data Silos With NetSuite
Oregon University’s official bookstore, The Duck Store, has a large brick-and-mortar footprint, with 10 stores on and around the school campus. But the retailer also saw the need to enhance its web site offering, combining its ERP, in-store point-of-sale and e-Commerce capabilities in one hub.
Last May, The Duck Store selected the NetSuite SuiteCommerce Advanced retail platform to migrate these functions under one system. Prior to working with NetSuite, employees at The Duck Store were spending as many as seven hours per day transferring siloed data between the company’s legacy ERP/in-store system and its e-Commerce platform.
“On our legacy system, we had different databases for our textbooks and our general merchandise,” said Alex Lyons, Strategic Technology Team Leader for The Duck Store in an interview with Retail TouchPoints. “That created these pockets of teams that were very isolated and only knew how to do their job function. We wanted to have a more global overview of roles throughout the company. NetSuite enabled us to break away from that siloed viewpoint and access data across all channels, allow team members to understand specific roles in that system, and look at products less from a division standpoint — textbooks vs. technology vs. sportswear — and more as a function they were serving from that supply chain.”