Bestseller is an international retailer and wholesaler operating in the fashion sector. With plans to open 1,000 new stores in the next two years, the company wanted to implement a retail solution that would support continued expansion. Bestseller chose to standardise on Microsoft Dynamics™ NAV, and found in its first deployment that it could open new stores faster, and that employees’ productivity and business insight was increased.

Business Needs
Founded in 1972, Denmark-based Bestseller sells a wide range of clothing and accessories in more than 3,200 owned stores and through 12,000 independent retailers throughout the world.

Operating in more than 39 countries, the family-owned company continues to expand rapidly under the guidance of Anders Holch Povlsen, Chief Executive Officer, Bestseller.

By 2009, Bestseller plans to open 1,000 new retail outlets. Povlsen and the Bestseller IT team recognised that to support this level of expansion it would need a retail solution capable of expanding with the business. Peter Ausum, IT Manager, Bestseller wanted to achieve this without building a complicated IT infrastructure, made up of separate point-of-sale (POS), supply chain management, and enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems.

Ausum identified that such an infrastructure would take time to administer and might limit the company’s productivity. Ausum says: “We have a substantial number of stores to manage, and it’s a huge operation maintaining our POS and back-office functionality. We needed to ensure that the new system was flexible and easy to work with.”

While Bestseller wanted to avoid a complex infrastructure with multiple interfaces and applications, it still needed to meet a diverse set of requirements across the organisation. The retailer wanted a solution to help:
• Store employees provide excellent customer service.
• Buyers assess demand and plan purchases effectively.
• Store managers appraise business performance.
• Head-office employees view and analyse data.
• IT workers manage operations more effectively.

Ausum says: “On a strategic level, we wanted data to flow seamlessly between ERP systems, POS, and our data warehouse. This flow of data is crucial for us and it needs to support many different stores in many countries.”

Solution
In April 2006, Steve Ballmer, Chief Executive Officer, Microsoft, visited Bestseller for a meeting with Povlsen. Ballmer was impressed with the support that Microsoft offers, and by August 2006, IT professionals at Bestseller were working with the Microsoft EMEA retail team to configure a solution.

Employees from Microsoft® Gold Certified Partners LS Retail and Munk IT joined the Bestseller to find solution that its employees could use for tasks such as order tracking, stock monitoring, and tracing transactions in real-time from the POS to the general ledger.

Two months later, Bestseller was presented with a solution that met its requirements. Building on the Microsoft environment it established in 2002, consisting of the Windows Server® 2003 operating system, Microsoft Exchange Server 2003, and Microsoft SQL Server™ 2000, Bestseller decided to implement Microsoft Dynamics™ NAV 4.0 business management software.
Bestseller maximised its IT investment through tight integration between its existing Microsoft technology and Microsoft Dynamics NAV.

This was combined with a complete retail solution from LS Retail, Retail NAV, which supports operations from the POS terminal to head office.

LS Retail supports complex multistore environments, making it the ideal solution for Bestseller to sustain its expansion. “We chose a solution built on Microsoft Dynamics NAV because we felt both the solution and partnership with Microsoft would support our company’s general expansion in the retail sector,” says Povlsen.

Following a successful proof of concept in October 2006, Ausum and his team worked with Munk IT to customise the solution. The team successfully piloted the new infrastructure at the flagship Bestseller store in Birmingham in February 2007 and has started moving existing stores onto the new solution. The Bestseller IT team now plans to integrate Microsoft Dynamics NAV 4.0 with Microsoft BizTalk® Server 2002 to run its processes in real time.

Benefits
By implementing Microsoft Dynamics NAV 4.0 and the LS Retail solution, Bestseller has business management software to control processes from store to head office level. The solution is easy to scale, simple to operate, and provides Bestseller with enhanced insight into its data and performance.

• Bestseller plans to standardise on Microsoft Dynamics NAV 4.0, which will reduce the cost of system administration. “Using the same system, on the same servers, we will greatly improve the efficiency of our team and reduce costs,” says Ausum.
• The company plans to roll out the solution at more than 1,000 stores and in excess of 5,000 POS terminals. The Microsoft Dynamics NAV infrastructure makes it easy and cost effective to deploy.
• The company’s helpdesk staff find it easier to support employees because they’re all using the same systems wherever they are based.
Employees find that they can adopt the new solution faster and can concentrate on providing excellent customer service. Ausum says: “In our Birmingham store they were running smoothly from day one—something we hadn’t seen before. It’s easy to use, and straightforward for new employees to work the tills.”
• Bestseller now has the core functionality to support retail processes, which are then integrated into the supply chain to regulate stock management and ordering. Buyers can access store analytics through many different Microsoft technologies, providing them with the insight to make accurate purchasing decisions.
• The Bestseller IT team completed their work at the Birmingham store faster because of the simple installation and preconfigured design of the infrastructure.
• Bestseller chose the Microsoft environment because it knew Microsoft was committed to innovation through its U.S.$6 billion annual research and development budget.
• The company’s IT professionals received excellent support from Microsoft Services. Ausum says: “We required some unique features in our retail solution. And we were delighted with the extra resources provided by Microsoft Services to help us to deliver them.”

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