Company profile
One of the largest furniture manufacturers in the world headquartered in Arcadia, Wisconsin, has its distribution centers in Washington, California, New Jersey and Florida in the United States, with global operations across Canada, Mexico, Japan, Central America, Japan, Singapore.
From the first HomeStore in Alaska in 1997 the retail arm grew to become 800+ stores worldwide, and the brand, the #1 home furniture retailer in North America.
The IT landscape
The IT landscape is spread across multiple applications supporting particular business functions.
Microsoft Dynamics AX ERP works in tandem with the e-commerce portal.
Microsoft Dynamics drives Retail, Finance, and Inventory operations.
Data integration capabilities of Dynamics ERP ensures seamless integration with the e-commerce portal, warehouse application, and third-party solutions such as payment gateways and mailing APIs.
An ever-increasing customer base, as the retailer’s business grew over the years, has increased data volume flowing to other Line of Business systems.
The challenge
- Huge volume of e-commerce orders due to the pandemic.
- An increasing customer base demanding real time data exchange capability, for customer care agents.
- Reports time-out and does not produce output due to huge volume of data.
- Newly hired customer care agents – to fulfill the business needs of the hour, often commit mistakes on the application.
- Custom web services are used to communicate with LOB systems.
The solution
The furniture retailer partnered with D4 to:
- Optimize existing Microsoft Dynamics 365 FO ERP.
- Implement Microsoft Dynamics Customer Engagement.
- Integrate with latest LOB applications for customer care and reporting.
- Enhance solution and production support.
- Train end-users to effectively use Dynamics 365 FO.
D4 Insight assessed key requirements, and optimized reports to print huge volumes. Dynamics 365 FO Business Events-based customizations were developed for real-time data exchange between applications.
Some of the frameworks/tools used
The result
The retailer realized immediate results in closing process gaps, and reduced errors:
- End users could now generate voluminous reports without hassle.
- Data Entities based real-time integration reduced data sync window with the downstream system.
- Line of Business systems could handle huge data volumes.
- Documentation and training to key users improved overall performance and reduced common mistakes.
