Situation
Shoe Planet is Pakistan's first multi-brand, mega-shoe retail chain. Shoe planet stores are very spacious and consist of 6,000Sq feet at each location. They cater to all the segments i.e. Gents, Ladies, Youth, Kids & Accessories under almost every Shoe category. Shoe Planet's previous IT system were cumbersome, and resulted in reduced data accuracy and delay in integrating shop data at headquarters. As a result, it was having a negative impact on the ability of the company to close its accounts on time, and provide management reporting in a reliable and timely manner. This affected the decision making process.

Solution
Mantaq Systems, a leading retail technology consulting company, presented Microsoft Retail Management System (RMS) as a reliable IT platform for Shoe Planet. Microsoft RMS, with continuous product enhancements, add-on modules from dozens of partners and a network of implementation of hundreds of partners, is already helping more than 40,000 retailers worldwide to run their businesses reliably.

Before the start of the project, one of the major criteria for the selection of the system was its ease of use. It made employee time management much easier and much more efficient. Microsoft RMS, well known as one of the easiest to use point of sales systems of the world, was selected as the first and only choice.

"One of the most impressive points about the implementation was that the entire staff at shoe planet especially the store staff showed very little or no resistance to the new system due to its ease of use", says Mr. Govind, GM, Shoe Planet.

Benefits
As soon as the system went live in the second shop, visible benefits began to be seen by management. "The user-friendly functionality of the software and the insightful, actionable data provided by the reports, gave us more visibility into our business and we began to see immediate positive effects of the system on our inventory levels", added Mr. Govind.

Reduced Inventory levels
The management team was able to reduce its inventory by 17% with a steady growth in Sales, within 6 months of the new system going live.

"RMS gave us deep visibility into our stock and sales data identifying both the hot selling as well as the slow moving items across a rich dimension-set like brand, season, store, color and size. This helped us in making decisions regarding restocking", said Mr. Irfan Aftab, who leads Supply Chain Operations (SCO). He added "Within the first few days of the GO Live of the system, we were able to clearly identify some articles that were doing well at one store and stacking up at the other. I remember stock transfers of a few Million Rupees in value done after seeing such cases."

Improved Staff productivity
One of the major impact of the system both at the Head office and the Stores, was how well it increased the productivity of the staff at Shoe Planet. Before the system was implemented, tedious fortnightly account closing activity was undertaken by the shop staff, for various departments. This took 2 -3 days and has now been reduced to a couple of hours of verification, as everything is available in a reliable format at the Head Office. "I have used many POS (Point Of Sales) Systems in my career but this system is by far the easiest to use" said Mr. Tanveer Khan, a cashier at Shoe Planet.

Book to Stock value
"Due to the ease of use of the system and seamless connectivity with other reporting tools, the Books to Stock Value has improved drastically during audits. Before the new system, Stock-Take was a cumbersome activity and even after a thorough inventory check, we would still find major discrepancies. Now, not only the stock take process is fast but we literally get no significant variation at the end of the audit" says Asst Manager, SCO.

The road ahead
"With the new scalable RMS fully operational, Shoe Planet is ready to take full advantage of both the rich feature set of the system as well as ready to add on other pre-integrated applications. We are now seeing more applications and are already contemplating adding a Stock Optimization Application as well as a Merchandizing System", says Mr. Govind.