Industry
Retail
Omnichannel CX and Intelligent Innovation – The Future of Retail
Highlights
- The retail industry has to be perceptive of customer needs as well as the technology landscape to stay ahead. However, legacy technologies with high total cost of ownership can prevent businesses from realizing opportunities.
- AO’s existing finance system had reached end of life following years of customizations, making it difficult to continue to change and operate, both for the finance teams and for tech support.
- The project has helped lay a strong foundation for AO’s digital transformation, enabling scalable, efficient, and data-driven finance operations. The improvements in finance will lay a strong foundation for streamlining the supply chain processes, allowing for better resource management and quicker response times.
On this page
Overview
Retail is a very competitive space.
So much so that some of the key technological innovations are first to be tested here as industry leaders work to constantly improve their customer offerings. That means, retail has to be perceptive of customer needs as well as the technology landscape to stay ahead. However, legacy technologies with a high total cost of ownership can prevent business opportunities from being realized.
The retail industry has traditionally been an evolving space. More recently, we have seen retailers hone their strategies to align with the consumer behavioural shifts as well as aligning with social media, among others. With AI in the mix now, the pace of change has exacerbated. While technology has always helped open new avenues and offer novel insights for the retail industry, we are now able to use technology to secure a more well-rounded and better understanding of consumer needs and deliver in line with their expectations. Going forward AI, agentic AI and generative AI will help deliver deeper views and insights using the troves of data on hand and help retailers become more perceptive of the trends, their implications, and subsequently design and implement effective strategies.
The UK’s most trusted electricals retailer AO wanted to buck the trend and was looking to upgrade its finance system to improve the reliability and speed of their finance operations. The Bolton-headquartered retailer was seeking a modern, scalable solution that could standardize processes across the organization while allowing for future automation.
End-of-life tech
AO’s finance system had reached the end of life following years of customizations.
This made it difficult for both the finance and tech support teams to continue to operate or change it.
In addition, the overall architecture did not have a holistic design across the various value chains given business-acquisition driven system assimilations. This meant changing the systems was an expensive endeavor, and with some legacy systems in play, it was hard for the company to create operational efficiencies.
The multi-faceted challenges underscored the need for a transformative solution. The company needed a modern, scalable solution that could standardize processes across AO while allowing for future automation.
From a business point of view, our biggest challenges really stemmed from the fact that the architecture was built through acquisition of companies historically, and so we'd never had a chance to design it across the value chain really holistically.
Even though there was no direct impact for the customers, AO was hoping to further improve its future delivery proposition for the customers by creating efficiencies, particularly in the supply chain.
Maximum efficiency
AO’s leadership concluded that they needed to pick the right product to build the future of the organization and choose the right partner to help deliver the biggest and most complex program they’d ever attempted.
For a transformation of this scale, they also needed a strategic partner who could offer global scale, domain, and technology leadership. This led them to TCS. To ensure minimal customizations and maximum efficiency for their operations, AO selected Dynamics 365 Finance & Operations, a cloud-based ERP system, as the foundation.
The TCS team presented a tailored road map that addressed both the current pain points and future aspirations of AO. Additionally, the product would allow further, future automation of processes, driving efficiencies across the finance operation.
The key elements of the project included:
- Implementation of a standardized purchase order (PO) system across all AO’s business areas, either replacing legacy systems or introducing POs for the first time. This ensured a significant improvement in control over purchase-to-pay cycles
- Systemized consolidation of group numbers, which is ready for full rollout in the financial year 2026 by replacing the existing Excel-based approach
- Improvements in documentation handling with the ability to add attachments to all transactions for an improved audit trail and making it more efficient to deal with queries
- Fully systemizing all fixed assets and leases to enable improved forecasting
AO strengthens its finance function for future growth
Scalable ops
The project has helped lay a strong foundation for AO’s digital transformation, enabling scalable, efficient, and data-driven finance operations.
Implementing Dynamics 365 on the cloud with its AI-driven process capabilities and robust cloud infrastructure has addressed the challenges in finance and logistics. In addition, features like invoice automation have streamlined tedious, manual processes, ensuring faster and error-free invoice management.
This, in turn, has helped cut the administrative burden and freed up colleagues to focus on strategic tasks. The AI-driven insights from the platform have also enabled AO to proactively address financial discrepancies by ensuring real-time data to decision-makers at all times.
The improvements in finance will lay a strong foundation for streamlining the supply chain processes, allowing for better resource management and quicker response times.
The finance transformation initiative, based upon Dynamic 365, has set up the right foundation for future transformation initiatives to be undertaken. So we are embarking on a large scale end to end supply chain transformation initiative, starting with warehouse management initiative.
For phase 2, the TCS team is focusing on supply chain and advanced warehouse management, with the project already underway and the teams from TCS and AO seeking continued opportunities for optimization.
TCS will be crucial as part of this to help us navigate that journey. Their continued support and partnership will make sure that we can continue to deliver, but we can also continue to leverage their deep product and retail experience.