Project Description
System evaluation and selection of a core merchandising system to support industry-leading business processes and enable a consistent real-time, global view of inventory.
The Client
A privately owned retailer and wholesaler of footwear and accessories, operating over 2,000 stores around the world.
The Challenge
The client had three separate highly customized software solutions handling their retail, wholesale, and franchise businesses.
As part of the selection process, the client wanted an unbiased consulting partner to identify business process requirements and improvements, as well as help them find a best-in-class core merchandising and finance solution to combine their different business processes into one system with a common view of their global inventory.
The Parker Avery Solution
The Parker Avery Group is vendor-neutral during software assessment projects and believes that the client is the final deciding entity in the selection process. In order to achieve this neutrality, Parker Avery guided the client through the multiple phases of the system selection process by providing an expertise-backed approach and tools that helped determine the best core merchandising and finance system for their business.
Parker Avery’s key tasks during this project included:
- Discovering current business processes and defining future state requirements based on industry best practices
- Researching applicable software solutions and planning the software selection strategy
- Creating demo scripts and scoring mechanisms to allow the client to rate vendors using common criteria
- Tabulating demo scoring results and presenting strengths and weaknesses for the software solutions
- Defining the business case and implementation roadmap to support the selected software provider
The Result
As a result of the project, the client selected a suitable core merchandising solution, which will handle all channels of their business in a common repository, allowing real-time visibility to data for all the client’s users.
After completing the selection process and reviewing the business case and roadmap, the client decided to enlist Parker Avery’s assistance and proceed to the implementation phase of the project with the selected software provider.
