Up until 10-12 years ago, the sales a retailer made would often be processed overnight, meaning that stock positions were at close of play yesterday and therefore pretty useless for a modern omnichannel world. Retailers weren’t able to offer their customers a true, honest view on what they had in stock at any given point in time. Opportunities from Store Fulfilment and promises made by early Click and Collect solutions often led to disappointed shoppers. The rise in expectation for omnichannel shopping experiences forced retailers to embrace real time sales and stock solutions and make choices about how to enhance or replace their legacy systems.
Many retailers chose the ERP route. It sounds simple enough to take an ERP off the shelf and deploy it across the business, but replacing legacy landscapes with any new ERP solution is a huge, risky and expensive thing to do. We all know a few ERP horror stories – millions of pounds wasted, and even some strong businesses brought to their knees.
A major consideration for any significant change programme is how best to integrate new components into existing technological landscapes. This is of course understandable – many retailers have certain ways of doing things and there’s no sense in complicating these routines if the benefit isn’t greater than the risk.
This is something that our clients haven’t needed to worry about when deploying our stock solution, Archean. By consuming transactions as they occur, Archean enables legacy environments to give a constant view of stock and stock affecting transactions, all in one place. This means that instead of disrupting a retailers’ existing infrastructure, Archean adds an ‘enhancement layer’ to give retailers a live view of their stock and manage the disruption and visibility of this detail, fulfilling the needs of legacy environments but also enabling the rapid deployment of new solutions and services.
Stock is not a single figure, it is reflected in multiple states, only some of which are available to sell. Archean is completely flexible in the way stock states, transactions and the way transactions affect stock states are defined, meaning it can be deployed to address multiple and varying business challenges.
In its first deployment phase, Crew Clothing used Archean to virtualise their segmentation of stock and to improve distribution centre process and space efficiency. Archean will soon be the point of visibility and stock transaction creation for stores and become the one true single view of stock.
The key to Archean’s success is flexibility. To learn more about our revolutionary inventory platform, please get in touch or book a call.
Or, to sum up this blogpost in the words of our CEO “retailers often have pretty crap systems; it costs shed loads to replace them and Archean can make things better.”