Major Brands Fuels Growth With LS Retail

With globalisation being the name of the game as far as commerce and consumerisation is concerned, international retail brands have a big market in India today. Major Brands is a player in this space. The company operates as a franchisee for many international brands in the Indian market. Across 30 of its stores, buyers can shop for reputed global brands like Mango, Nine West, Promod and Charles and Keith. By the end of 2009, Major Brands plans to touch the magic figure of 100 stores, expanding to newer regions across India.

Pre-Implementation Scenario

Due to the large volume of the business, Major Brands was facing lots of issues with the integration of its billing and accounting systems. However, this was only one of the many operational hindrances the company was facing at that time. The company realised that many international brands for which it was acting as a franchisee had successfully deployed the LS Retail solution on Microsoft Dynamics globally to integrate their businesses. Major Brands decided to extend the same benefit to its operations.

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So were there any contenders against LS Retail? Kamal Kotak, MD, Major Brands, says, “We considered Retail Excel and Retail Pro but found many good features in LS Retail and hence chose this solution over the others. Its feature of ‘Promotional Offers’ particularly drew our attention. Other features related to auditing and Master Replication also met our needs aptly. On top of everything, LS Retail can be integrated very well with Navision.”

Before the decision to deploy LS Retail was made, all the stores of Major Brands were dependent on disparate software, which only addressed the accounting issues in the organisation. Rakhee Nagpal, MD and founder of DVS, (the vendor for LS Retail) says, “Before Major Brands chose to upgrade their IT systems to LS Retail, it was facing most of its challenges as a result of lack of information, manual errors and data movement issues between disparate systems on different platforms. This was found to be the case within each of their outfits separately in India and Dubai, as well as the fact that there was no synergy amongst the two international businesses of Major Brands. From a decision-making perspective, the lack of an IT backbone for the business was hindering the aggressive growth plans of Major Brands.”

With plans to grow multifold, both regionally and globally, Major Brands realised that constant availability of information was an extremely critical requirement. As an end-to-end integrated application, LS Retail helped the company to fulfill this requirement.

Challenges During Implementation

Be it any company, the staff is accustomed to working in a particular manner and any new change is more often than not welcomed with stiff resistance. The case was no different at Major Brands.

Also, the retail industry faces constant attrition, so the training programme at the company had to be a regular exercise. It had to be planned and executed in such a way that new recruits were easily able to use and fully exploit the benefits of the new business application.

One major challenge that Major Brands faced was related to the inventory they sold of third-party vendors like Shoppers Stop. Since there was no billing system in place at such outlets, the implementation partner EBT Solutions had to develop a separate utility so that sales data received from such outlets was automatically imported into Microsoft Dynamics.

Benefits

After successfully implementing LS Retail across majority of its stores, Major Brands is now able to better manage its inventory, sales and promotions online. Also using this single, integrated solution, Major Brands is able to customise its range of products and its availability according to the client’s requirements.

“A big challenge we faced earlier was master updation at all locations, which was made very easy by the replication feature of LS Retail,” says Kotak. “Before we implemented LS Retail, activating promotions in the system was a major issue. There were a lot of manual things done in terms of pricing and manual calculation of discount at tills. We were also not able to have a control on tills or the cashier, which we are now able to quite smoothly. Overall, the security features of LS Retail have helped us in many ways.”

The Road Ahead

The company is planning to implement a loyalty programme for its customers. Plans to start e-Commerce through the website are also in the offing.