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Booker Cash & Carry

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Formerly part of the Big Food Group and now owned by a group of venture capital companies and the Icelandic group, Baugur, Booker has 32% of the UK cash and carry and collect market. It also supplies independent retailers and caterers and runs its own Symbol group, Premier Stores, with 2,000 stores.

The company claims to touch 95% of the population, all within a 15 minute drive time of its 173 sites.

The Problem

Chris Mangham, IT Director for Booker Cash & Carry, says, “It’s a volatile market, so we wanted to ensure we were providing the best possible service to our customers. However, our existing systems were no longer adequate to this task. The cost of ownership was high for existing legacy systems and important functions such as differential pricing and customer segmentation were not available on old platforms.”

Mangham adds, “We had made a pledge to our customers: ‘We want to make it easy for you to do business with us.’ In order to fulfil this pledge, we needed to use systems that would enable us to offer customers low prices.”

Existing systems were mainframe based, with various islands of information which meant that there was no central data repository.

The Solution

The company was well aware that the move to new systems would involve a massive change programme because the projects would involve switching over core systems, primarily Master Data.

In addition, Booker had a range of different customers with different requirements, including independent retailers, retailer members and catering customers. Booker therefore required a robust solution that could be tailored to meet its needs. SAP was regarded as the most flexible solution. “We were mindful of the fact that customising software to fit your own requirements is expensive. It was therefore crucial that the original design was right for the business. We looked for a partner that could help us get things right the first time.”

Booker chose to implement Articles, Customer Relationship Management, Vendor & Site views, Listing, Pricing and Promotions, and amended the existing financial footprint to be compatible with the new functionality. Booker also upgraded to SAP 4.7 as part of the project. SAP Portals were introduced, providing a platform for communication between the branches, enhancing visibility, and providing access to messaging, new processes and training materials.

The Choice

Booker trawled the market for integration partners among the tier one vendors and settled on CIBER after a three month search. Mangham says, “We chose CIBER because they are dedicated to retail, uncompromised by commitments in other sectors, flexible, close and experienced. They were also able to demonstrate flexibility in terms of processes and people. And by processes, I mean that they did not try to make us do things their way.”

The project had a number of distinct challenges that the project team had to face and overcome. This was a large scale project with a wide-ranging scope. CIBER managed the implementation by phasing the delivery as much as it could. Much of the new infrastructure was put in as early as possible to help manage and spread the risk. Where the project team could break up the functionality it did so. This also enabled the company to test the applications across the new infrastructure in smaller, less risky projects.

The Benefits

CIBER and Booker managed one of the largest SAP retail implementations in the UK. Since its completion, Booker has become an SAP Center of Excellence.

The Master Data project went live on schedule on June 6th 2005, to time and budget, in what proved to be one of the most extensive SAP migrations in the UK. The whole process went very smoothly.

The project group was kept in place to ensure that regular communications went out to the business to reinforce the benefits that the new system was delivering.

With the master data platform now fully functional and claimed by Booker to be even more stable than they had expected, the company now plans greater automation of orders and billing for national accounts. Their goal is to continue to improve customer service.

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.