Petit Bateau Japan

Petit Bateau Japan (PBJ) Success Story

Petit Bateau Japan imports and sells fashion goods, mainly children’s clothing, designed and manufactured by Petit Bateau France, a company with a history of over 100 years. In Japan, Petit Bateau Japan sells through its own stores as well as in outlets. PBJ also distributes its products via wholesalers, online (E-commerce) and on consignment basis.

Project background

Petit Bateau Japan was looking for an ERP and a POS system which allowed them to manage real–time their overall retail operations from the head office down to the stores. Petit Bateau Japan concluded that Microsoft Dynamics NAV and LS Retail the add-on solution developed for the retail industry, would best suit their needs, as they could provide in the standard version all the necessary functionalities to cover the POS, Stores, head-office, warehouse and accounting functions. Moreover the fact that Microsoft Dynamics NAV is widely implemented world-wide gave confidence to Petit Bateau that this package could also be implemented in other subsidiaries, if the need arose.

Financial management issues

In the previous system, the supply chain staff prepared monthly sales and inventory reports at the end of each month to be used by the finance department for its monthly closing. As far as the wholesale activity is concerned, the data was prepared in Excel format which made it difficult to reconcile timely.

IT system issues

The previous system did not allow one store to access inventory data in another store or in the warehouse
The POS and the inventory management systems had been used for 10 years and they needed to be replaced with new technology
The previous system could only be accessed by a person with system administration skills and therefore each department had to go through that person to get the analysis reports they needed
In the previous system, replenishment computation was processed manually after the person in charge of the supply chain gathered all the necessary information for data analysis from the system administrator. Due to the volume of data processed, it was necessary to automate this process

Selecting the New System

The new system had to cover as much functionality as possible in its standard version. Microsoft Dynamics NAV and LS Retail emerged as the solution that could cover many of the required functionalities in the standard versions, therefore reducing the need for customization and ensuring to keep the implementation within the planned time frame and budget. With the addition of a powerful reporting tool, Jet Reports for NAV, the #1 reporting application sold last year worldwide, PETIT BATEAU Japan is now able to effectively analyze its sales at the product and at the POS level

Conclusions and Benefits

Necessary data is now accessible real–time by using the standard functions of Microsoft Dynamics NAV. The NAV unique functions that allow to copy and paste to MS Excel are very convenient for users
Store sales statements can be posted automatically on a daily basis therefore reducing the accountant’s workload
It is possible to set-up sales discounts for specific time periods
The use of the CRM functionality enables sales analysis at the customer level
As a result of the integration of store sales, purchases, stock and wholesale sales in the same system, time for data input and to investigate discrepancies has been tremendously reduced
Store can access their own stock as well as stock in other stores or in the warehouse
Thanks to the many attributes included in the item master, flexible data analysis can be performed
Price discount settings such as Mix and Match have reduced manual entries at the POS level

In the previous system, replenishment allocation and shipping documents were produced using MS Access which contained data from the main DB. The product demand by store was computed only by comparing the stock available in the store with the minimum store requirements. Today, all the above manual tasks have been automated and thanks to the new settings available in NAV, average sales are also factored in the replenishment equation, resulting in time savings. Furthermore, it is now possible to set-up priorities among sales channels, such as store vs. wholesale, for product allocation, resulting in an improvement of the service provided by the supply chain department.

— Supply Chain Management Staff

Since it is now possible to drill down from the posting screen to the actual transaction, it has become much faster and easier to research and solve discrepancies prior to closing the books. After having used NAV for 3 months, we can say that time required closing the books has been reduced significantly.

— Accounting Staff

In the previous system, data source was only accessible by the supply chain team. Now we can access the data directly, easily and real-time. This reduced the processing time tremendously. And it will get only better as we become more proficient in the use of Jet Reports.

— MD Staff