NEWS 07
DIRECT WINES LOOKS OFFSHORE FOR GROWTH
D
irect Wines, is overhauling its central IT systems after a successful implementation of
new software to support its growing international business.
The UK-based merchant is one
of the world’s largest direct-to- consumer and online wine retailers. But, in order to support its rapid growth overseas, it needed to overhaul its business management systems. Gary Isaacs, Direct Wines chief
information offi cer, told Retail Technology the company’s legacy systems were too aged and unwieldy to support the multiple accounting and compliance requirements for manage its catalogue based order-to- cash business in different countries. “The big project has been to roll out the new standardised systems across the international sites and overseas businesses we’ve acquired,” he said. “The plan is then to roll it back into the business centrally and replace the legacy UK systems.” Direct Wines decided to implement a customised enterprise resource planning (ERP)system based on single instance of Microsoft Dynamics AX 4.0, serving multiple languages, currencies and locations.
Offshore IT services provider,
Infosys was contracted to manage the development and implementation of retailer’s AX implementation in Switzerland, Australia and then the US. It was able to employ its own Microsoft Centre of Excellence and background in deploying Microsoft Dynamics AX projects worldwide. “We needed a partner to help us tailor the system for international markets and add a localised customer- facing front end to it,” Isaacs said. “With Infosys’ offshore model, we got dedicated people onsite, as well as the offshore development expertise. And they could supply skilled resources quicker than we could.” Having completed the
international roll out over a year ago, Isaacs said the ability to streamline and automate core business processes globally and support multi- brand marketing initiatives, business analytics and reporting with secure access capabilities has supported rapid growth. As well as providing the Microsoft Dynamics infrastructure, Infosys also designed and developed a new e-commerce platform for Direct Wines. In the past four years, this implementation has aided the growth from Direct Wines from two to
seven international markets in Europe Australia and USA, from three to 27 websites, and seen non-UK revenues grow from 4% to 25% of group revenues.
The new sites are for Direct Wines global expansion, but they also saw direct UK benefi ts, with traffi c to the UK websites seeing a growth in revenues, conversions, new customer recruitments during the Christmas period last year of 35%. “The main benefi t is that, when
you make a change a price and it is authorised, it can be pushed out to all the websites in seconds,” Isaacs added. “And we can introduce other changes and promotions very quickly. With that kind of control, you can make sure that if a customer makes an order online and rings us about it, the order is already there on the call centre system.” In addition, sales per hour from outbound calls have increased by around 10% due to customer service interface improvements. And a new customer dashboard helped to improve call quality and reduce call times by up to 30 seconds per call. Isaacs concluded: “The best thing
is, that when we roll the system back into the UK, we know it’s already proven.”
SHOON MANAGES MARKDOWNS
Independent family shoe retailer Shoon has adopted a new price markdown labelling solution to help realise time and money savings. SATO’s TH2 labelling system
has allowed Shoon to slash sales preparation time in its 22 stores from two and a half days to just fi ve hours. The retailer has also been able to save money on duplicate label costs. Jonathan Newton, Shoon’s
marketing and design manager, said:
“To have this technology make such a huge impact on our business, so quickly, is extremely impressive and it means that our employees can spend more time serving our customers, which is really important. The TH2 solution is helping our company to realise real cost and time effi ciencies and, down to its versatility in design, we will be looking to use it for a wider variety of applications in the future.”
◆ T.M. Lewin is the latest customer to sign a fi ve-year contract with MidlandHR for iTrent – the single platform for talent management, workforce planning, human resources (HR) and payroll. Richard Small, head of HR at T.M. Lewin, commented: “The driver for selecting MidlandHR was the need for a fully-integrated HR and payroll solution.”
◆ Aurora Fashions, the group behind women’s fashion brands Coast, Oasis and Warehouse, will launch its fi rst native language website this October in the group’s largest European market, Germany. It will also unveil Aurora’s new tabulated website approach to providing a one- stop-shop for all three brands, as well as one basket and one combined checkout, to maximise cross-selling opportunities.
JULY/AUGUST 2011 RETAIL TECHNOLOGY
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