New retail ERP drives business for SuperCheap Auto

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Published on the 25/02/2014 | Written by SAP

AT A GLANCE

SuperCheap Auto Group

INDUSTRY

Retail

BUSINESS OBJECTIVE

A strategic ERP system that could cope with aggressive expansion plans

SOLUTION

SAP ERP Retail
Professional services provided by NTT DATA Business Solutions (formerly Extend Technologies)

FOR MORE INFORMATION

SAP
P: 1800 287 727
E: info.australia@sap.com
E: info.newzealand@sap.com
W: www.sap.com/australia

When the mega retailer needed to achieve its growth plans, management realised it needed to shift a gear in order to cater for its aggressive expansion plans…

SuperCheap Auto is Australasia’s leading retailer of automotive and boating, camping and fishing products, with 300-plus stores and 4000-plus employees. Its brands include SuperCheap Auto, BCF-Boating, Camping and Fishing, and Goldcross Cycles. When SuperCheap Auto’s (SCA) management realised in 2008 that the company had outgrown its legacy systems,it went to market to source a strategic ERP. At the time of the evaluation, SCA was a sub $200 million business trading only in the eastern seaboard. In this context, it did not specifically need a tier 1 solution. However, management had aggressive expansion plans for the existing brand and for additional brands as well as geographic expansion. This drove them to select, SAP Retail, a strategic ERP system that would provide them with the flexibility to grow channels to market and expand into new geographies without IT constraint. The project involved implementing SAP Retail with these strategic initiatives in mind.

Other projects
NTT DATA Business Solutions, is SuperCheap Auto’s IT partner and has alreadyworked with the company ona number of projects including the acquisition of South Australia/Western Australia-based retailer; expansion into New Zealand (introduction of multi-company, multi-currency); a BI implementation; the acquisition of Camp Mart (re-launched as BCF); Project FOSIL (Focus On Supply, Inventory and Logistics) SuperCheap Auto’s supply chain improvement project; the SAP MDM (Master Data Management) implementation; the SAP XI (PI) Implementation (integration to WMI warehouse management); the SAP ERP 2005 upgrade; and the implementation of a mail order business.

Key challenges
The SAP ERP Retail implementation project provided a number of challenges for the team and NTT DATA Business Solutions. Firstly, SCA has an in-house developed POS that was redeveloped as a separate parallel project using .NET Framework and enhanced to read and write SAP formatted output (i.e. Idocs).

Secondly, during the initial implementation of SAP Retail, supply chain management software maker Manhattan Associates was doing an upgrade to its Warehouse Management Integration (WMI) so NTT DATA Business Solutionshad to integrate with WMI while the upgrade was occurring.

The system also had to deal with:

Automotive aftermarket retail company
Multiple brands/banners
Operating in Australia and New Zealand
Large data volumes
Large, complex BI implementation

Timeline
The project was broken into three phases, with the blueprint phase lasting 10 weeks, the realisation phase lasting 20 weeks and the final preparation and go-live taking six weeks.