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Harvey Nichols: Superb business visibility, improved control, lower costs with Merret

January 2009

In 2004 Harvey Nichols recognised the need to improve IT: to deliver business efficiencies, cost savings and new opportunities for more effective retail operations.

Alistair McDonald, Senior Business Systems Manager: “At that time, IT was seen as just being there to fix PCs. Costs were perceived as too high, and we were also receiving poor service from our IT suppliers.” The catalyst for change was the opening of a new store in Dublin; Harvey Nichols’ legacy system, Mercatus, did not have multi-currency support. With the cost of developing Mercatus too high, McDonald says the business decided to start from scratch, with an enhanced system providing new functionality. Indeed, Harvey Nichols wanted to improve IT services while simultaneously reducing costs, treating this work work as a strategic development to provide additional competitive advantage. Since 2005, Merret software and Retail Assist have supported the business.

Why Merret?

Martin Schofield, Retail Operations Director, Harvey Nichols:  “We were attracted by Merret’s flexibility and functionality: it offered a core package we could tailor to our specialist needs while, conceptually, allowing us to maintain it as a packaged solution. Further developments have been relatively easy and cost effective. It is an open system, which means we have the flexibility to write our own custom web applications, for example.” Another important reason, McDonald says, was the ethos behind the company: “They were clearly people we could work with, and the extra value delivered by a good working relationship is very important to us. You often don’t get that type of relationship when you work with a big technology provider. Harvey Nichols is a massive brand name but a relatively small company, and we wanted a provider we could relate to. We had confidence Merret would deliver the solution we wanted.”

The solution

Merret was delivered on time and to budget, while an RF infrastructure was also implemented in Harvey Nichols’ centralised warehouse. The system, which has undergone extensions and enhancement since 2005, now comprises various elements.

Supply chain ERP – the core solution includes multi-currency support, integrated WMS and RF picking, auto-suggested POs, real-time sales data (retail and hospitality), HHT for store stock movements, APIs (product, PO, pars), and home shopping support. Implementation included interfaces to ITIM’s Chameleon PoS, with real-time trickle-feed sales data coming every 10 minutes rather than waiting until day’s end for polling, plus links to Pivotal CRM software and Fresca ecommerce. In-store fulfilment is a more recent extension to the ecommerce system.

Store scanners – Martin Schofield: “This was an opportunity to enhance operations by centralising control, providing a real-time environment and enabling high levels of flexible communications between Head Office, stores and warehouse. Our cost-effective solution delivers measurable efficiencies – long gone are the days of masses of paper flowing through the business, inaccurate counting and a stock position that might be days out-of-date. We have a highly effective back-office solution to support multi-channel real-time retailing.”

Business intelligence and corporate performance management — the original Merret system connected to tools including Hyperion, Arthur Planning and Business Objects, until these were replaced by Merret BI & CPM powered by BOARD technology. According to Alistair McDonald, “With this powerful solution for retail BI and CPM, we benefited immediately from faster, more coherent and reliable consolidated reporting to support decision-making.”

Integrated Buyers Workbook – this is a recent development by Harvey Nichols itself. When buyers go on trips to suppliers, they upload the latest information to their laptop before they leave. They add new information whilst away and, when they return, this automatically goes into Merret. No need to re-key this data has delivered improvements in accuracy and efficiency plus time savings.

CRM – using data fed from Merret into Pivotal, Harvey Nichols can also able track through purchase histories, performing historic basket analysis to target marketing and better serve its customers in the future.

Thanks to these and other key developments, Harvey Nichols has significantly reduced the number of systems required to support its operations.

Benefits

McDonald says, “Before Merret, our processes were good but they were also labour-intensive, paper-based and time consuming. With Merret, we immediately had real-time and trickle-feed sales data. We know our position every 10 minutes, which is very important, and also brought in advanced replenishment. In addition, supplier replenishment wasn’t available in Mercatus. Now, we can set ideal stock levels in stores and, we hope, have an opportunity to reduce the amount of stock we might need to write off. The nature of our business means we stock very wide but also very shallow: with a dress costing £3,000, we might hold just one or two in each size. So it’s critical that you know your stock. We have far greater visibility and better stock accuracy, and can work in better and smarter ways.”

Martin Schofield adds, “Merret BI & CPM, powered by BOARD technology, displaced applications like Hyperion and Business Objects to provide Harvey Nichols with ‘one version of the truth’. We have new insights and improved reporting across key areas including daily sales, seasonal sales and stock, and budgeting. Today more than ever, we need to have the ability to make the right decisions quickly: Merret gives us this fantastic degree of visibility, revolutionising how we work.”

McDonald agrees: “With Business Objects you need technical know-how to write a report. It’s very inflexible. BOARD technology got rid of all that, with head office ‘power users’ in particular getting what they need. In budgets and forecasts, for example, hundreds of spreadsheets used to move though the business. We have been able to consolidate all that reporting, saving at least one week’s activity for a person in finance.”

Martin Schofield concludes, “Merret enabled us to consolidate a number of systems into a single integrated solution. By doing so, and reducing the number of suppliers we needed to work with, development and support are not only more effective but we also anticipate a continued reduction in administration and costs.”

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