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Retail and Supply Chain Success: National Tire Retailer Centralizes and Automates Complex Inventory Across 1,900 Stores
A scalable solution has become the cornerstone of the company’s ERP landscape by centralizing a large, complex inventory in one system running on Azure
About
This tire retailer has more than 1,900 stores that provide tires and service across the US.
Challenge
After HSO implemented D365 Finance, this retailer asked us to help reconcile records between the POS and inventory systems. When a sale happens, they have less than ten minutes to pick tires from inventory and deliver them to stores. Because of high volume and variety of inventory from different suppliers, the system could not provide an accurate inventory count.
HSO determined that, prior to an inventory management solution being put in place, the retailer first required a data platform modernization with a common repository and big data processing and consumption in near real time to support the volume, variety, and transaction quantity.
Solution
HSO took a data-first approach, replacing the on-prem solution and correcting issues with the cloud deployment of D365. The data solution leveraged HSO's DnA Accelerator to accelerate the implementation of the Azure Data Platform with Azure Data Lake, Synapse, and data pipelines to provide a common repository, provided near-real time data processing by downstream apps/reports, and provided the ability to add new tables and D365 entities without major code changes,
Results
Data is made available in Delta format for curated zones, which provides: 1) highly compressed data, which reduces storage costs; 2) optimized big data processing for high-performance queries to execute; and 3) near-real time availability.
Once the data platform project was completed, HSO kicked off the inventory project with Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management.
While all inventory, including products used for service, needed to be centralized, the company decided to start with tires. They carry multiple SKUs from 12 manufacturers, so tires are the biggest and most important lift. This scalable solution has become the cornerstone of the company’s ERP landscape by centralizing a large, complex inventory in one system running on Azure.
The retailer recently acquired 500 stores and is bringing on 800-1,000 more. While this could be accomplished (with manual migrations) in an on-premises environment, it would not be sustainable. With Dynamics 365 and the new data platform in place, onboarding to the system will no longer cause performance loss.