Brocard

The brand has been rapidly expanding its footprint in Ukraine since the opening of its first store in 1997 and is currently the country’s largest luxury perfume and cosmetics chain, with 96 stores and more than 1.8 million regular customers.

BROCARD combines a high-quality product range with direct deliveries from global brands and personalized customer service across all channels and touchpoints. Another strength of BROCARD is reliability. Their many years of experience and expertise gave them a high level of trust and brand recognition among suppliers, partners, contractors, customers, and employees. What also makes the company strong is that it provides a unique experience in its stores, which appear in the best shopping centers in Ukraine. “Our brick-and-mortar stores are for people who want to come and feel our products. Although this approach is sometimes considered outdated, it is very important for our industry, which requires the use of the senses,” says Olena Lada, Strategic Development Director of BROCARD.

Business case

For many years, BROCARD experienced difficulties using a patchwork of systems that couldn’t communicate information. “Our company has always implemented many projects by different teams and different people, and the biggest difficulties have always been connected with integration,” says Dmytro Yushin, Chief Information Officer of BROCARD. When different processes are separated into different platforms, everything happens not in real time but afterward, which can slow down decision-making. This may result in business gaps, financial losses, and lost profits.

The disparate systems also made daily tasks more complex and prone to errors. “External mail, internal correspondence, working with certain files, manually entering goods into two different systems— one for the office and the other for the online store and retail network— each with its own internal architecture. A lot of tasks were done outside the systems as well, in spreadsheets and subsystems because our solution couldn’t offer the support and integration needed,” says Dmytro. Having too many processes slowed down the company's performance and also required long training periods for employees. “Staff needed to learn not one system and not one process, but 5-7 systems and subsystems. That's when we decided to unify our approaches and standardize everything we could.”

Before implementing LS Central, BROCARD had been using another solution since 2002, which did not leave much space for innovation and development. Marketing also suffered, as there was no opportunity to diversify marketing tools. At some point, the vendor stopped further product development of its product, leaving the company with old and largely outdated functionality. BROCARD knew they needed access to new opportunities for a large business like theirs.

The solution

To find the software that best fitted the needs of their business and customers, BROCARD started reviewing its business processes. BROCARD wanted to make their business omnichannel, combining customers, products and services consistently. The new software should include a simple and user-friendly interface with the possibility to customize it for the local language. But the most important requirement was that it would allow the company to scale.

Additionally, the company wanted to prioritize a system with strong eCommerce capabilities due to the launch of their new online store. BROCARD was looking for a new system that would be able to deliver real-time information about product availability across channels and facilitate delivery to the customer’s preferred location.

The company evaluated multiple ERP suppliers before they chose Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central.

The company decided to work with LS Retail partner SMART business on the implementation. “It was important for us to work with a partner based in Ukraine with sufficient experience, resources, and knowledge to implement everything our company needed,” says Dmytro. “SMART business recommended LS Retail’s unified business management software, LS Central, which extends the Business Central ERP with functionality for retail.” One of the factors in favor of Business Central and LS Central is that they use a similar technology platform. This was particularly important to BROCARD since their previous platform used SQL Server and .NET, both of which are Microsoft technologies, and would make the transition between platforms smoother for the staff.

The implementation

The implementation into physical stores coincided with the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, so building effective communications was a challenge. “The process was mostly remote, which was not usual for our company, as well as for many others,” says Liudmyla Sevriuk, CEO of BROCARD. “During this period, we had unique experiences with organizing project activities and applying agile methodology, which is now used for other projects.”

The company conducted a pilot project with one store, where they observed and analyzed the results of the implementation. After that, BROCARD rolled out the solution across all 96 stores. They decided to make the transition as quickly as possible, which also required a lot of resources.

SMART business managed to transfer the entire chain of BROCARD stores to LS Central in just four months. The main challenge during implementation was the online platform. The integration with Magento CMS took longer than initially expected, and the system required a few customizations so that it would fully cover the needs of the business. “Initially, we took on a large amount of work with minimal partner involvement, and it was not very effective,” says Liudmyla. “When we started to cooperate more closely, the process accelerated.”

“BROCARD's comprehensive approach to building a scalable IT ecosystem based on Microsoft technologies is already bringing noticeable results to BROCARD,” says Anton Onyshchuk, Business Development Manager at SMART business. “The LS Central implementation project is a history of transformative changes, which indicates a willingness to adapt to modern challenges and transform approaches to business management.” The SMART business team is always ready to contribute to this.

Benefits

Since implementing LS Central, BROCARD now enjoys a 360° view of its business from a single platform, from POS to finance and supply chain. A platform that includes functionality for the warehouse, retail, and back office—where information works in real time, stays consistent, and makes it easier for managers to use—allows BROCARD's business to work much quicker. The solution has enabled the company to:

• Automate processes that took a very long time and were inconvenient to do manually.
• Use one data source for the entire organization. The company does not have to worry about data integration and replication issues anymore, as all their data is now processed within a single system. BROCARD can track product movement more easily; from the order from the supplier to the shipment, to the end customer. Analysts and management now have a reliable source of information for making the right management decisions.
• Gain more visibility into inventory. The client can check real-time stock availability across all stores.

“The implementation of the system has taught us the most important thing, which is to scale quickly and respond to challenges,” says Liudmyla, “We can already see how right this decision was and how well it affects a large number of our business processes.”

Some of the positive changes the company has already experienced include:

• Real-time reports accessible from anywhere. There is no more amateurism and misinterpretation, everyone is now guided by the same logic.
• Reliable and continuous operation of the infrastructure. The new system has given BROCARD the impetus to review the infrastructure of its retail stores. The company is now considering significantly reducing the equipment used, which will lead to lower support costs and further improve the overall reliability of the system.
• Improved processes for picking and assembling orders, which has significantly increased the warehouse throughput for issuing and shipping orders.
• Giving online shoppers real-time information about product availability, which is a major step towards omnichannel.
• Collecting more relevant information about customers. With a comprehensive view of customer order history, operators can provide better service in the online store.
• Auto-release of orders, which allows the company to process 5– 10 times more orders per day during peak seasons. If orders meet the criteria for auto-release, the warehouse receives them and processes them further. By using both a manual order processing tool and an automated system without the participation of call center employees, the business can process orders in a timely manner during peak workloads.
• More convenient receiving of goods in the store, thanks to continuous scanning of goods and automatic processing of the results.
• Integrating the bank terminals with the POS, which significantly reduced the number of transactions and cashier errors.
• Improved internal IT processes. Testing several different project management methodologies during the implementation helped BROCARD organize its IT department in terms of support, development, and internal IT operational processes in general.

While BROCARD has already implemented LS Central for their physical and online stores, part of the ERP functionality is still being implemented. BROCARD is currently running the system in a private cloud, but the company is gradually testing and making the necessary preparations to run LS Central as a hybrid solution.