In a deal worth £400 000, leading menswear specialist, Moss Bros, is embarking on a project to deploy the latest Argility software, with the goal of upgrading its operations.
As an established user of Argility's point-of-sale and warehousing solutions, Moss Bros sought to extend its successful high-street and online operations. The objective behind the deployment of the new solution is to improve customer ease of access and service delivery, no matter what channel the customer chooses for enquiries or to perform transactions.
Argility has a dominant presence in the retail market in South Africa and a longstanding relationship with Moss Bros Group in the UK. Moss Bros is the leading company in suit retail and hire, with a history going back to 1851.
Argility's partnership with Cordys - a leading global provider of business process management (BPM) software - means the company can build the agile business systems required to satisfy all of Moss Bros' needs.
“Moss Bros is much more than just a traditional retail business,” says Kevin Gray, commercial product executive at Argility. “With a large and expanding online customer base, including retail and bespoke sales, plus hire services, they need a business solution capable of offering real-time access from any channel to their established Argility sales, merchandising and warehousing systems.”
“We face rapidly changing customer needs - this in turn changes the way we do business,” says Brett Grobler, head of IT for Moss Bros. “With online orders equalling or exceeding walk-in turnover, it is critical that we deliver the best possible customer service, no matter what channel is involved.
“We then face the challenge of managing these systems so that our management can get instant, up-to-date views of what is happening with stock and sales.”
The combination of Argility's expertise in retail solutions with Cordys' lengthy experience in BPM was the answer. The solution is flexible, easily integrated with other line-of-business software and affordable.
It achieves better service delivery, improved productivity and can rapidly adapt to changing business needs.
“The combined Agility and Cordys solution provides extensive management reporting,” says Grobler. “Cordys was one of the first companies to realise the potential and demand for cloud computing and our system is built to take advantage of those abilities.
“Most importantly, it means we are giving our customers instant service response and delivery in a competitive market where other companies are just a click away, not just down the street.
“Our goal is to become even more customer-focused, across all channels. We are investing about £1.4 million in total on our IT strategy, including this new solution, and we are confident that we will get real business value from this project. We also anticipate a return on this investment in less than two years,” notes Grobler.
Gray says Argility is creating a suite of retail business applications underpinned by the Cordys Business Operations Platform. “The Moss Bros cross-channel application is one of several customer collaborations that will ultimately deliver the Argility Retail Operations Platform - an SOA-based suite of applications for cross-channel retailers,” he concludes.
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