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B&Q

CIBER 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 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 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 was selected by B&Q International as prime implementation partner for SAP Retail at B&Q’s operations in China. As Gilman explains, “CIBER 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 '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 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 UK

CIBER 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 ’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 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.