Success Stories > Retail Industry

Customer is one of the largest consumer retailers in North America, operating over 500 stores in 50 states and Europe.

Challenge: Approached with significant investment costs to upgrade and expand current functionality with their current software partner, the customer engaged Fulcrum to assess the benefits of maintaining, investing further, or changing direction with respect to their current ERP systems. Long-term, the customer wanted to ensure their application strategy would help the company achieve the goal of maintaining its recognition as being one of the "Best Places to Work". Similarly, to maintain or invest in an ERP solution that would provide enterprise view and access to company information, provide customer based self service capabilities, enable process change and allow for measurement of benefits.

Solution: A joint team of customer and Fulcrum specialists worked through the following activities to determine the current state of fit and readiness for change, including:

• Envisioning exercises were completed with executives to understand the mission, goals and objectives for the administrative pision
• “Brown Paper” sessions were used to construct “to be” business flows that supported the long-term goals of the business
• Analysis was conducted on current costs (hard and soft) around the current systems investments; similarly, process and cycle time opportunities were identified to support process innovation flows
• Peer and industry benchmarks were developed and compared to customer operating environment
• ERP function/business fit analysis was completed on existing ERP and 4 other leading packages that supported future administrative requirements
• Business case and project plan was constructed to support “implementation” workstreams

During implementation, the joint project team focused on eight work streams that focused on process and technology improvements to support the vision of the administrative pision. Ultimately, the customer determined that a different ERP suite mapped better with the “to be” goals of the company.

Upon acceptance of the business case, customer and Fulcrum designed and implemented process innovations, implemented new ERP modules, provided training in the new business processes and system functionality, built measurements to ensure long-term benefits realization and outsourced the maintenance of support functions to third party

Results: The overall project paid for itself 4 months earlier than planned due to improved processing efficiencies and reduced systems maintenance costs. Fulcrum satisfaction rating was 4.71 out of 5 (5 being the best)