A Wholesale Transformation for a High Street Fashion Retailer

A well-known high street fashion retailer engaged us to optimise and scale their wholesale business processes. Using a highly agile and collaborative approach, we successfully standardised and simplified several key systems. We automated manual, time-consuming processes, increasing data accuracy and visibility, upskilling teams, and effecting significant time and cost savings. This led to deep insight into how data is shared across the business, which created a foundation for subsequent infrastructural initiatives and growth opportunities.

Challenge

Within a rapidly changing retail climate, our client’s wholesale channels had become one of its primary growth areas, but its teams were struggling to scale with the demand.

The channel was managed almost entirely on spreadsheets with little structure and consistency across the many teams within the company. Manual data input and reconciliation against disconnected systems hampered progress further.

Under strict budget and timeline constraints, our aim was to rapidly develop solutions to automate, standardise and streamline their end-to-end business processes. We would unify operations across multiple teams, enabling growth and establishing a platform for new opportunities.

Approach

Through in-depth analysis and process review workshops, we captured pain points in technology and business processes while identifying opportunities for streamlining operations.

Our consultants built strong, open communication channels across all levels of the business. This promoted rapid feedback, a deep understanding of employee roles, documents, systems and the underlying processes, with broader insight into relationships inside and outside the organisation.

Our agile approach to rationalising and simplifying enabled business teams to be active in requirements gathering and the system build. We designed our tools with best practices in processing and maintaining data at speed, accuracy, reliability and usability. Users would also have an approachable route to general standardisation and automation of highly manual tasks, with clear and concrete benefits.

We would map and analyse the more complex processes, to determine the degree of business or technical endeavour they required.

A multi-disciplinary team of a highly analytical, collaborative mindset developed functionality in short sprints.

Our team remained open to new ideas while refining the toolset alongside the infrastructure and support mechanisms.

We provided hands-on training and support.

Outcome

Our team automated several key steps. This minimised the risk of error and reduced time consumption; with more time to effectively manage customer orders, team productivity and confidence rose.
We delivered a standardised toolset and workflow across seven separate teams, providing cohesion and a framework for larger strategic growth.
Our work allowed the business to take on more customers and orders.
We initiated work on a database to support the spreadsheets, allowing integration with the company’s primary ordering and warehouse management system.
Our steps empowered the business to think more progressively on how to build and implement technology at speed whilst remaining closely aligned to business needs as they evolve.

Case Study