Digitizing the Retail

Supply Chain

Digitizing the Retail Supply Chain

Overview


The distribution of consumer electronics is a complex business, with this particular client being responsible for a significant part of the supply chain distributing televisions to some of the largest retailers in the United States. However, they faced an issue with the returns process which was significantly impacting their financials, customer satisfaction, and overall supply chain logistics.

To meet the needs of each retailer, the returns process had evolved into a custom process that varied for each retailer. The result was a manually intensive process that required significant dedicated manpower and was still time-consuming and prone to errors resulting in above-average financial loss from inventory mismanagement. None of the involved parties ranging from consumer, retailer, or distributor were satisfied with the experience or the results.

Challenge


Emergys, who was already engaged in this client’s SAP implementation identified this issue during their business process discovery efforts and proactively proposed an innovative digital application approach to transform this inefficient business process.

They envisioned a self-service portal-driven design to be integrated with the core enterprise systems for a seamless solution with the compliance and financial controls addressing everybody’s needs. Additionally, the solution would be a Software-as-a-Service platform ensuring the client’s technology and operations groups were not responsible for support or maintenance.

Our SaaS solution provided the client
with both process standardization
and real-time data

Our SaaS solution provided the client with both process standardization and real-time data

Solution


The resulting application was extremely successful in addressing all identified business and operational issues. The HTML5 based self-service portal allowed any consumer or retailer to access a standardized returns process with real-time status updates that not only transformed the user experience, but it eliminated the errors and mistakes of a manual process.

The integration with the core ERP systems ensured that financial loss was significantly reduced, and the overall logistics process was streamlined. In the end, Emergys’s ability to synthesize their business process, enterprise systems, and digital application development expertise was critical in helping their client solve a significant business challenge.

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