Vinod Patel

Vinod Patel is a well-known building material, home improvement, and home goods retailer in the Republic of Fiji. The company, which started as a family business in 1962, today employs over 2000 employees in Fiji, Samoa, and Timor-Leste across retail, distribution, financial services, properties, and manufacturing divisions. The Vinod Patel and Home and Living retail stores are popular for their wide range of hardware, building materials, tools, furniture, homeware, appliances, and electronics. Besides the physical stores, the company also sells online through their website.

Business case

For many years, Vinod Patel ran its operations using a niche specific POS and ERP software which lacked flexibility, preventing the company from implementing new functionality. The software was also designed specifically for B2B businesses in the building materials industry and was not able to keep pace with Vinod Patel’s expansion across more B2C and retail-focus categories such as home goods and electronics.

Vinod Patel was not able to drive productivity improvement on a legacy software system and started looking for a new management system that could keep up with the company’s growth.

The solution

Vinod Patel compared several solutions on the market with the hope to find the one that best aligned with their organization’s goals, with the right partner to implement it. The team investigated multiple alternatives, but all these solutions would have required Vinod Patel to invest in additional software to cover all their processes, leading to higher costs.

After multiple rounds of meetings, the management team at Vinod Patel decided to implement LS Retail’s software LS Central. Their decision was based on three reasons:

• LS Central extends Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central ERP with advanced retail functionality (POS, store operations, inventory, loyalty, eCommerce, and more), enabling businesses to control their entire business, front to back, within a single platform.
• The software offers high scalability and can be easily implemented in more locations and countries.
• LS Central POS works both online and offline, ensuring business continuity even if the internet goes down.

“LS Central met our current business requirements while providing the flexibility required to grow our business across different product categories, retail formats, and geographies,” says Patel.

Local LS Retail partner DXC Technology provided Vinod Patel with a clear vision and managed the deployment of the solution following a big bang approach. The go-live day saw 30 physical stores switch to the new system at the same time - a fantastic achievement for the teams involved. “The implementation journey required to bring finance, sales, purchase, inventory, retail, reporting processes together for a large-scale operation with Fiji VAT monitoring system compliance,” says Carsten Pedersen, Senior Executive at DXC Technology. “It was a good experience where both parties brought in the right people to make decisions and define the most efficient processes for the company.”

LS Central proves itself to be of great assistance to Vinod Patel for a wide range of tasks. They use it to:

• Handle checkout sales for customers paying at the counter
• Generate a quote on the spot, retrieve a quote when customer returns, and convert it to sale quickly
• Manage Purchase Order approvals and Sales Order approval workflows
• Handle hire-purchase and enable credit customers to make payment at any store
• Minimize markdowns through central pricing and automated discounts

To manage their warehouse operations efficiently, the company uses DXC Warehouse and DXC Warehouse Scanning extensions for Business Central. These extensions enable additional features such as:

• Ability to create multiple warehouse receipts for a single Purchase Order
• Advanced pick, packing and labelling features for shipment processing

• Increased mobility, with the ability to execute all key warehouse processes such as receiving, putaway, inventory management, picking and stocktaking, from a scanning system

Benefits

By implementing LS Central, Vinod Patel has been able to get rid of disparate software solutions and reduce operational costs. This, in turn, enables Vinod Patel to make better informed decisions and respond quickly to changing customer needs and market trends. The IT department can also easily deploy the changes and customizations needed.

Some of the benefits the new system has brought include:

• Immediate access to information across all locations – Having a single source of information, with real-time visibility, has increased data accuracy and consistency, improving communication between stores and warehouses. “Stock availability and stock management is much better, the management has visibility within 30 minutes across the store network,” says Jaganath Reddy, Advisory Solution Architect, at DXC.
• Quicker order fulfillment of sales from the POS – The staff can place a customer order from any POS device, and this can be fulfilled from different locations when stock is not available in a specific location or from a vendor. Items can then be shipped to the customer’s preferred location. This fulfilment model enables Vinod Patel to sell items from any store or warehouse, fulfilling sales coming from any store across the country.
• Optimized transfer of items between stores and warehouses – Having the same inventory system for all locations enables Vinod Patel to track deliveries, capture proof of delivery and send notifications to the customers when their order is ready.
• Improved omni-channel services – LS Central easily integrates with Shopify eCommerce platform, enabling real-time communication between LS Central and Shopify, and synchronization of orders, stock, pricing, promotions, and customer information.
• Scalability – LS Central supports international expansion: the system can handle local languages, currencies, and payment providers.
• Increased mobility with multi device compatibility – The company uses POS machines, desktop machines and tablets to serve the customers in the store.
• Ability to track individual transactions from the POS to the General Ledger, which maximizes the control over the business.