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Battery World, a large retail franchiser providing portable power and specialist batteries, has commenced the rollout of a new cloud-based business model to improve insight and customer service.
The retailer is replacing over 80 instances of on-premise COSTAR point-of-sale (POS), an in-house intranet, and multiple manual spreadsheets by deploying Netsuite’s OneWorld platform.
Battery World has become Australia’s largest battery and power specialist since it was founded in 1997. However, opportunities to extend its leadership position have been hampered by disparate software systems. The company has been unable to share data between its 80 plus stores, leading to various customer service issues.
“The expectations of today’s customers are significantly different to those of 10 years ago,” said Rowan Hodge, general manager at Battery World. “A seamless, customer centric retail experience is now a pre-requisite to create and maintain brand loyalty.”
The lack of a centralised system to record financial planning, reporting, marketing and CRM insights also meant accessing critical business data was time-consuming and error prone.
Having transitioned from being primarily trade-based into a large mainstream retailer, Battery World’s current platform architecture was unable to scale for any future expansion into e-commerce or other territories.
After careful evaluation, NetSuite’s OneWorld cloud-based business management solution was chosen to help Battery World run its POS, financial consolidation, franchise inventory management, CRM marketing, real-time analytics and reporting across the board.
Hodge said the model was chosen because it can support the franchise network and grow with the business into the future because of its empowering value adding capabilities.
“[This solution] offers cutting-edge POS functionality and future proofs us for any multi-channel, multi-geography business development going forward. We can rest easy knowing we have a platform that gives us more control and visibility,” said Hodge.
NetSuite OneWorld’s two-tier ERP model can also enable Battery World to deploy the cloud across its franchises, whilst integrating with its existing on-premise QAD Enterprise Application solution at its head office.
“As a franchise business, one of our key roles is to help new franchisee stores benchmark performance and best practice. NetSuite can enable us to lift our game enormously by providing this type of business critical information to our expanding team," said Hodge.
Battery World is currently commencing rollout of the new system in five of its company-owned stores this week, including two in regional New South Wales and three metro Sydney. Meanwhile, franchised stores will start to roll out in the first quarter 2015.
The retailer also has plans to deploy NetSuite SuiteCommerce to enable e-commerce transactions from the same single unified cloud platform.