Città improves its business processes and customer service with Microsoft Dynamics 365 and DXC Eclipse

Città is a leading designer of homeware products based out of New Zealand. They design, import and distribute a comprehensive range of homewares sourced from leading manufacturers around the world. The company found its aging IT infrastructure was hampering its growth, so it moved to Microsoft Dynamics 365, implemented by DXC Eclipse, the Microsoft practice within DXC Technology, to drive a digital transformation that is changing the way it does business – from predictive analytics to customer experience.

Challenge

Based in Auckland, New Zealand, Città designs and retails an extensive range of furniture, lighting and homewares. Città operates across wholesale, retail and online, each presenting their own unique opportunities and challenges. Its aging IT infrastructure was unable to provide business insights and accurate data needed to engage customers in a fiercely competitive retail environment.

Emmett Vallender, COO, Città explains that the business is focused on gaining a competitive advantage by digitally transforming its end to end business processes. “We want to have the right product, in the right quantity, in the right place, at the right time. That requires accurate information and the ability to predict trends so we can meet customers’ changing demands. Technology plays a critical role, providing a platform for optimising operations and streamlining the supply chain.”

Solution

In 2016, working with Microsoft partner DXC Eclipse, known internationally for their deep retail industry experience, Città was the first company worldwide to go live with Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Retail, Finance and Operations.

Dynamics 365 has given the company a single source of truth. “Before implementing Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations, we had limited insight into department reporting and analysis, this in turn hindered our ability to see exactly where we were going. Critical functions such as inventory management, stock counts, landed costs were managed manually, so we were guessing at times,” says Vallender.

One of the big priorities for the business is to have enough stock in store to meet demand without running out or being left with unsold stock at the end of the season. This was a manual process in the past but now with standard capabilities of Supply Chain within Dynamics 365, Città can determine the right product mix for each store.

Results

“Dynamics 365 and Power BI delivers the insights we need to know what the next steps are. Digitising has allowed us to automate our operations, and for the first time we have real time information on landed costs and better insight into stock levels. We can serve customers better – giving them more information on products they are interested in and tailoring communications based on their preferences and previous interactions with us. It’s hard to imagine how we did business before Dynamics 365,” Vallender explains.

“Our partnership with the team at DXC Eclipse has been a critical success factor. Their knowledge and experience in the retail industry coupled with their understanding of the Microsoft ecosystem has allowed us to implement best practices so that the technology supports us now and in the future,” adds Vallender.

For the retailer, being able to rely on data and analytics reduces the guesswork around customer preferences and helps streamline the supply chain. The business can now focus on engaging with customers in a more meaningful manner, developing an omnichannel experience, leveraging the cloud and CRM.

Grant Taylor, CTO, Gough Group and former COO, Città adds, “The next stage of our digital transformation is segmenting our customers and getting offers in front of them that are appropriate. We want to harness the power of business intelligence to predict what they are interested in.” “What we’re trying to do is segment our customers, find more of them, and get offers in front of them that are appropriate. It’s basically about looking at what we’ve seen other customers do and using analytics and artificial intelligence to basically predict what they might be interested in,” Taylor says.

Dynamics 365’s inbuilt business intelligence is a key support for Città. And, being cloud based means that the same platform can be used to underpin the company’s international plans and scale to support the business now and in the future.

“Having an integrated end-to-end cloud platform Dynamics 365 is really good for the business. With the core pieces in place, we can now focus on improving and fine-tuning the data. The richness of the solution enables us to continue integrating other parts of the business that can deliver greater insights –warehousing, lifecycle management etc. We’re no longer constrained by our technology, in fact it’s enabling us to do things we could not do but should have been doing all along,” concludes Vallender.