The Sea Harvest Factory shops were established to provide South Africans with high-quality and affordable seafood products.
Business case
The company was using an old POS system that was not connected to their ERP system. As Sea Harvest’s retail operation began to grow and expand, it became more and more difficult for them to manage their retail business from Head Office. They had problems with managing pricing and promotions, replenishing stock, and getting up-to-date sales and financial information. Each store was a standalone installation, which added further challenges as the retail environment grew.
The solution
The company evaluated multiple software solutions, focusing in specific on those that would work seamlessly with the Microsoft ERP system Sea harvest uses and the core of their IT architecture.
The company wanted a system with rich retail functionality and that could grow with the business. Sea Harvest worked with IT partner allonline365, a certified LS Retail partner. When allonline365 presented LS Retail’s unified commerce software, Sea Harvest realized it aligned with all their key criteria. Knowing that LS Retail software is aligned to the Microsoft Dynamics roadmap sealed the deal.
At the start of the project, Sea Harvest acquired a new seafood company with its own retail operations, which had to be part of the implementation of the new system. These stores were rolled out when the new company went live on LS Retail software, while the Sea Harvest Factory stores were rolled out over a period of 10 months. Much of the implementation had to be done remotely due to the restrictions imposed by Covid-19.
Benefits
As a fast-growing organization with increasing stakes in the retail space, it was important to Sea Harvest to connect all retail-related business operations into one unified solution. Some of the biggest benefits the company has derived include:
- Improved decision making in the retail environment - Having visibility from head office on stock levels, selling prices, profitability, etc., has helped make more cost-effective decisions.
- Improved workload for finance – Retail functionality is now part of the same software solution as the ERP. This means there is no need to manually transfer journals for inventory values and revenue from an external system into the ERP.
- Increased efficiency – The company can now see when issues arise and take fast action. “One of the biggest wins since we implemented LS Retail software has been around stock visibility and understanding where stock losses had been occurring”.
In the future, Sea Harvest plans to expand its business online. They know they can rely on the functionality of the LS Retail software solutions and on guidance from their IT partner to be successful.
