 B&Q
CIBER Novasoft fixes it for B&Q abroad
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B&Q International (BQI) is the international arm of the leading
UK DIY and homewares chain, B&Q, and a part of the UK retail
group, Kingfisher.
BQI stores are in mainland China, Taiwan and Turkey. BQI also has
responsibility for Kingfisher's home improvement business, Nomi,
in Poland. It is responsible for a total of 64 stores, globally.
The Problem
In the early days of B&Q abroad, each country subsidiary made
its own systems decisions. However, this caused problems as BQI
began realising its goal of expanding into other countries. As Steve
Gilman, BQI director and B&Q UK board director, says, “While
there is always room for growth in the home market, the potential
abroad is huge; Shanghai alone has 18 million people. That’s
why our goal is to grow B&Q's reach.”
BQI identified that the fastest and easiest way to roll out new
stores and to maintain central control over store management and
performance was to provide a single IT platform supported by integrated
core systems. Gilman states, “Home-grown systems were never
going to be the answer, so we looked to SAP to add value.”
B&Q UK was already implementing SAP, but BQI needed additional
help to handle international implementation and roll-out, and to
provide local country support.
The Solution
B&Q International adopted virtually the entire SAP for Retail
offering, embracing accounts, financials, merchandising, EPoS, shipping,
purchasing (internal and external) billing, replenishment, stock
management, warehouse management and business warehouse.
CIBER Novasoft expedited the implementation process by creating
a template of pre-configured processes within SAP Retail. This template
was based on the management of B&Q stores in Turkey and created
a common framework for other countries. As a result, the project
was able to limit the amount of bespoke programming to under 10
percent. The added advantage of this approach is that it will be
easier for BQI to lower its cost of ownership by upgrading to new
SAP releases in the future.
Using the international template, the business process design was
greatly accelerated. It was completed in only 4 weeks, followed
by SAP training for the project teams. While implementing Business
Warehouse, CIBER Novasoft again kept costs to a minimum by creating
a template for reports.
SAP Retail now supports the largest B&Q store in the world,
located in Shanghai. Gilman says, "In China, we created a great
systems base at very, very low cost and put together a project team
that implemented the solution in only seven months. It was a tremendous
success.”
The Choice
B&Q in the UK also uses SAP and, while BQI was in no way obligated
to take the same route, the parent company's experiences convinced
BQI that integrated systems were an effective way to manage subsidiaries
based in so many different territories.
CIBER Novasoft was selected by B&Q International as prime implementation
partner for SAP Retail at B&Q’s operations in China. As
Gilman explains, “CIBER Novasoft has more SAP skills than
even the largest consultants and also the largest installed base.
We could see their SAP implementations working at retailers across
the world.”
BQI was impressed by CIBER Novasoft's specialisation in SAP Retail
and their wide experience in its application. Peter Roberts, a partner
at Tamazan Business Associates, consultants to BQI during the selection
process, says, “CIBER Novasoft was the only partner to design
a methodology for deploying SAP in under ten months.”
The Benefits
BQI has described the benefits of adopting SAP Retail as better
customer availability and cost reductions. Gilman says, “We
can record sales and margin accurately and as a result have boosted
our margins. We have given ourselves a lead over our competitors.”
He adds, “We have also improved employee allocation, benefit
from faster processing, and can depend on international support
that is not tied to local software firms.” He continues, “We
have been able to easily add new functions – notably customer
ordering, which enables us to handle orders in stores for items
out of stock or manufactured elsewhere.”
BQI has also implemented SAP Business Warehouse, a data warehouse,
allowing stores to analyse sales and stock levels.
Gilman concludes, “We now have the ability to drive costs
down and drive benefits up, which is what information systems are
all about.”
About CIBER Novasoft UK
CIBER Novasoft is a leading SAP consultancy providing world-wide
support for a range of high profile clients in the retail sector.
We have maintained our reputation as the world's leading SAP Retail
implementation partner ever since being the first partner to implement
SAP Retail when it was launched in 1996.
CIBER Novasoft’s success in the UK has been built on the
retail industry’s main priority today: integration of systems,
data and processes to provide a seamless retail management and customer
experience across multiple channels. Our customers include numerous
high profile brand names such as The Big Food Group, B&Q, Direct
Wines, Dunelm Mill, French Connection, Goldsmiths, and Halfords.
CIBER Novasoft is part of CIBER, Inc. (NYSE: CBR), a leading international
systems integration consultancy providing superior value-priced
services to both private and government sector clients. CIBER’s
global delivery services are offered on a project or strategic staffing
basis, in both custom and enterprise resource planning (ERP) package
environments, and across all technology platforms, operating systems
and infrastructures. CIBER serves client businesses from over 60
U.S. offices, 20 European offices and four offices in Asia, operates
in
18
countries with
8,500
employees, and has an annual revenue of more than
approximately $1.2 billion
million. CIBER is included in the Russell 2000 Index and the S&P
Small Cap 600 Index.
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