Case Studies in Retail Store Locations

Case Study 1: Bath & Body Works Holiday Rollout Synopsis The challenge represented a near logistical impossibility. But, working with 267 selected service vendors, the Titan team masterminded a flawless system to roll out holiday displays to Bath & Body Works stores all over the country. The solution took shape as a well-coordinated blitz by more than 750 delivery teams on two subsequent Sundays at the start of the retail industry's busiest season. This article originally appeared in the Summer 2006 edition of the Atlas Amplifier, the magazine of Atlas World Group. If you were in the market during the holiday shopping season for fragrant personal care products, you may have followed your nose to one of the more than 1600 Bath & Body Works stores across the U.S. As you explored the aromas there, you would have seen a striking display a tiered tower loaded with goodies as well as Christmas trees festooned with cherry-red ribbons and bows. The delivery of those displays was a collaborative, perfectly timed effort of Atlas agent Specialty Moving Systems and Atlas subsidiary Titan. "When I was asked to submit a bid for this project, I knew it would require extraordinary resources," says Wes Wodka, National Account Representative with Specialty Moving Systems. "The scope of this rollout was the biggest we had ever encountered. The trick would be to deliver to every one of the Bath & Body Works stores, on a Sunday evening, within a window of approximately five hours." Wes contacted Titan to tap its potential for what he knew would need to be a logistical hat trick. Titan put together a contract-winning proposal based on efficient planning, perfect timing, and flawless execution. Not only did the plan look good on paper, the solution materialized with uncanny precision. "A lot of credit goes to Wilda Poehler, Special Projects Manager for Titan," says Wes. "She was extremely organized." A True Team Effort Wilda is quick to point out that the project would have been impossible were it not for a comprehensive team effort.

"This job involved everyone at our site in some way to help in planning and in communication with the service network," says Wilda. "It was a massive undertaking, necessitating the use of warehouses and equipment all over the country. "Wilda explains that several of the stores in the retailer's chain are located in rural areas beyond the existing Titan network. This required the Atlas subsidiary to qualify new warehouses according to its stringent quality standards. "All told, we worked with 267 different service vendors, including 40 selected Atlas agent partners," says Wilda. The first deliveries took place on Sunday, October 9, to 62 locations. The remaining deliveries (over 1500) took place Sunday, October 16. "We handled two different kinds of displays holiday trees and plexiglass towers," says Titan Contract & Sales Administrator Karen Minnerly. "The display manufacturers shipped us the products marked with numbers coded to each store location. We handled from one to six pallets and ten to fifteen cartons per store." "In some cases, one team could make delivery to two locations," says Wilda. In other cases, it was one team per store. All together we orchestrated more than 750 delivery teams." Titan headquarters served as a central communications point on the night of the massive rollout. As deliveries were completed, the Titan information system scanned the store sign-off sheets and uploaded them to the Titan web for verification. Although there were a few eleventh-hour surprises, such as an unexpected store closing, the deliveries took place with an amazing lack of complications. "There were very few, and very minor, delivery issues," says Wes. "For example, there was an instance where someone forgot his keys and had to make a trip back to get them. But there were absolutely no service failures. It was phenomenal." To recognize the excellent service it received, management for The Limited, parent company of Bath & Body Works, sent a plaque of appreciation to Titan and to Specialty Moving Systems.

Case Study #2: Benjamin Moore Paint Displays Synopsis Titan partnered with two other firms to bring a logistical solution to Benjamin Moore & Co., a leading U.S. manufacturer of premium quality residential, commercial and industrial maintenance coatings. Working with Design Display Group and Atlas Specialized Transportation Group, Titan ensured the timely delivery and placement of color sampler displays in hundreds of retail locations across the U.S. This article originally appeared in the Winter 2006 edition of the Atlas Amplifier, the magazine of Atlas World Group. Aunt Gertrude is a lovely lady. But sometimes she has trouble making up her mind. Take, for example, the time she went through five gallons of paint before she finally decided on the color that would look best with her cherry cabinets and mauve curtains. Thanks to Benjamin Moore & Co., fussy decorators like Aunt Gertrude now have a commonsense tool to help them choose colors. The color sample display lets them try a color on for size before they commit to painting an entire room. And thanks to collaboration among Design Display Group, Titan and Atlas STG, these displays are showing up in locations across the country. "Titan and Atlas began working on this project for Benjamin Moore in May of 2004," says Titan Special Projects Manager Wilda Poehler. "In February of 2005 we teamed with Design Display Group. All told, Titan and Atlas have set more than 2800 units in place." STG National Account Supervisor Darlene Duff says the Titan-Atlas partnership makes for efficient service. "Titan sends us the orders with the information we need to register, coordinate and deliver," says Darlene. "We deliver anywhere in the U.S. within two weeks; our operators unpack the units and set them in place." Titan Sales Manager Mark Sesti believes the cooperative approach brought efficiency to the project right from the start. "STG Vice President of Sales David Coulter and I met with representatives from Design Display Group and the marketing team of Benjamin Moore to gain a clear understanding of their expectations," says Mark. "We took the findings from that meeting to develop a solution using our combined strengths. Everyone involved with the project has benefited from this collaboration."Design Display Group is a leader in merchandising design and display branding. Benjamin Moore & Co. is a leading U.S. manufacturer of premium quality residential, commercial and industrial maintenance coatings.

Pantaloon: ERP in retail Needing an organization-wide IT solution to help it perform better, Pantaloon decided to implement an ERP system from SAP. ByKushal Shah More than eight years after it forayed into the retail business, Pantaloon Retail decided to implement SAP to keep itself competitive in the rapidly growing Indian retail market. Store operations have never been as important to retailers as they are now. Successful retailers are those who know that the battle for customers is only won at the frontline, which in the case of a retail chain is at its stores. Pantaloon was regularly opening stores in the metros and there was an urgent need for a reliable enterprise wide application to help run its business effectively. The basic need was to have a robust transaction management system and an enterprise wide platform to run the operations, says Rakesh Biyani, Director, Pantaloon. The company was looking for a solution that would bring all of its businesses and processes together. After a comprehensive evaluation of different options and software companies, the management at Pantaloon decided to go in for SAP. The Solution Some of the qualities of SAP retail solutions are that it supports product development, which includes ideation, trend analysis, and collaboration with partners in the supply chain; sourcing and procurement, which involves working with manufacturers to fulfil orders according to strategic merchandising plans and optimise cost, quality, and speedvariables that must be weighted differently as business needs, buying plans, and market demand patterns change; managing the supply chain, which involves handling the logistics of moving finished goods from the source into stores and overseeing global trade and procurement requirements; selling goods across a variety of channels to customers, which requires marketing and brand management; managing mark-downs and capturing customer reactions, analysing data, and using it to optimise the next phase of the design process. The implementation The implementation was outsourced to a third party. The implementation was done by the SAP team with help of Novasoft which is based out of Singapore, says Biyani. Some people from Pantaloon also assisted in the project. About 24 qualified people worked on this SAP implementation. SAP was chosen as the outsourcing party on a turnkey basis. This project was headed by Pantaloons Chief Information Technology Officer, Chinar Deshpande.

Three Phases SAP implementation is not a single phase process. The project was divided into three phases.The first phase involved blueprinting existing processes and mapping them to the desired state. In this phase, the entire project team worked on current processes within the structure of the organisation, analysed and drafted them. This blueprint was later used in the formation of new states of the solution. Since the SAP would combine all the processes, each and every one of these had to be evaluated. In the second phase, the SAP platform was developed with the help of Novasofts template which was predefined by SAP after evaluation of Pantaloons needs and expertise in retail solutions. The last phase in this project was for stores to switch over to the new system and for current data to be ported. Before the SAP implementation, all the data was unorganised. This data had to be migrated to the new SAP application. The project was flagged off on 15th June 2005 and took about six months to finish. It went live at the head office on 1st January 2006. The stores went live on SAP from 1st January 2006 to 30th June 2006.
About the Company

Pantaloon Retail is the flagship enterprise of the Future Group, with a presence across multiple lines of business. The company owns and manages multiple retail formats that cater to a wide cross-section of Indian society. Headquartered in Mumbai (Bombay), the company operates through four million square feet of retail space, has over 140 stores across 32 cities in India and employs over 14,000 people. The company registered a turnover of Rs 2,019 crore for FY 200506.Pantaloon Retail forayed into retail in 1997 with the launching of its fashion retail chain, Pantaloons in Kolkata. In 2001, it launched Big Bazaar, a hypermarket chain. This was followed by Food Bazaar, a food and grocery chain. Next up was Central, a first of its kind located in the heart of major Indian cities. Some of its other formats include, Collection i (home improvement products), E-Zone (consumer electronics), Depot (books, music, gifts and stationary), aLL (a Little Larger, fashion apparel for plus-size individuals), Shoe Factory (footwear) and Blue Sky (fashion accessories). It has recently launched its e-business venture, futurebazaar.com. The group's subsidiary companies include, Home Solutions Retail India Ltd, Pantaloon Industries Ltd, Galaxy Entertainment and Indus League Clothing. The group also has joint venture companies with a number of partners including French retailer Etam group, Lee Cooper, Manipal Healthcare, Talwalkar's, Gini & Jony and Liberty Shoes. Planet Retail, a group company owns the franchisee of international brands like Marks & Spencer, Debenhams, Next and Guess in India.

Benefits and Challenges The key challenges in this project were not in the implementation. Rather, the difficulties were faced during the data migration and in managing the interim period when the project was underway for about six months. Migrating unorganised data to an organised format is a challenging task. Pantaloon has not been able to see immediate benefits from this implementation. This application certainly has long term benefits which will be seen when the performance of various aspects will be analysed. It is too early to calculate RoI. We have already started working on MAP (Merchandise Assortment Planning), Auto-Replenishment and Purchase Orders. We hope to use these systems to optimise our inventory and cut it by about two to four weeks (depending on the line of business), says Biyani.

Maintenance & Hardware This application is currently being used by around 1,200 employees across the organisation. For maintaining this implementation and its related applications, Pantaloon has an in-house team and it has outsourced ABAP resources. They are also in the process of setting up a SAP Competency Centre. The system runs on a HP Superdome server on HP UNIX 11i and the database is from Oracle. The cost of this project was about $10 million. Future projects After the successful implementation of SAP for its retail chain, Pantaloon plans to go ahead with IT projects such as implementation of WMS with RFID, Customer Intelligence and CRM. Inventory and Promotions Optimisation will be pursued later this year.

Case Study 1: Store Layout To determine the ideal store layout, the client TNS proposed a Pathtracker study to understand store traffic flow, hot and cold spots within store, and shopper missions. Exit surveys and Worldpanel data could be used to supplement and enrich the findings from the Pathtracker study. For each category in store the Pathtracker study enabled the number of shoppers passing by the fixture, those stopping at the fixture, and those purchasing the category to be calculated. The study also enabled category affinities to be identified. With lead categories identified (visitors/stoppers/ purchasers), together with mission types and affinities, the ideal store layout could be planned with consideration of which categories are most likely to be purchased on which mission and how flow can be improved through store. Exit interviews uncovered softer issues with the existing store layout, and Worldpanel data could be used to quantify opportunities by category and mission. TNS conclusions and recommendations On average only 39% of the store was visited. The left hand side of the store received little traffic

Categories were classified as leader, high interest, niche or under-developed based on shopper conversion rates Propensity to buy each category by trip type was identified Category affinities for the lead categories were calculated. Next steps The insights enabled the development of an optimal store concept, driven by the location of the lead categories and appropriate adjacencies. When implemented in-store, sales increased by +7%. The client issue The TNS approach The outcome

would need to understand: what the lead categories were what the main shopping missions were which categories were more likely to be purchased on which missions what the main category affinities were how traffic flowed around the store any shopper attitudes related to using the store.