Aditya Birla Fashion and Retail Limited implements modern customer-centric store operations with Microsoft Dynamics 365

The fashion conglomerate includes Pantaloons, one of India’s most preferred destinations among large format retail stores with multi-brand merchandise; and Madura Fashion & Lifestyle (MFL), which operates exclusive brands such as Louis Philippe, Van Heusen, Allen Solly and Peter England. Internationally, ABFRL’s portfolio also includes The Collective, one of India's largest multi-brand retailers of international collections such as Ralph Lauren, Hackett London, Simon Carter, Ted Baker, Fred Perry, Forever 21, American Eagle and Reebok. While the Company's ethnic wear business includes brands such as Jaypore, Tasva and Marigold Lane.

In pursuit of its vision to “passionately satisfy Indian consumer needs in fashion, style, and value across wearing occasions in apparel and accessories,” ABFRL has come to personify style, luxury, and comfort.

The scale at which ABFRL operates is extraordinary. By 2022, the company was generating more than 200,000 retail transactions per day at 2,500 point of sale (POS) terminals in Pantaloons stores and more than 3,000 POS terminals across MFL outlets. With industry dominance on this scale, ABFRL needs to ensure that its retail transactions are powered by a solution capable of consistently superior performance. As the company embarked on a pioneering digital transformation journey to the cloud, Microsoft Dynamics 365 was the perfect match.

Designing the future

Growing pains are a good sign, but they still hurt. As ABFRL grew its offerings, it outgrew its legacy on-premises store operations solution. The strain on the tool caused stress for both employees and customers in the checkout lines when a product in a cart wasn’t found in the system, the result of slow data refreshes as inventory flowed in and out. And the need for larger support teams to manage the expanding network drove up security and administration costs. It was far from the seamless experience ABFRL sets as its standard. 

The company needed a solution that could synchronize data from headquarters to the retail stores in real-time to make product information and promotional offers available when they were needed. In its search, the company prioritized improving visibility at the store level to expedite checkout, enhance customer experience, increase employee productivity, and deliver better business outcomes.

The solution

ABFRL chose to move to the cloud with Dynamics 365 to eliminate infrastructure overhead while simultaneously enabling it to rapidly scale up for new stores and brands as it grows. 

Implementation started in the first half of 2020. Between January 2021 and April 2022, ABFRL rolled out more than 5,500 Dynamics 365 Commerce POS terminals to its entire network of more than 2,000 stores in two phases - each covering the Pantaloons and Madura Fashion and Lifestyle Division business units respectively. The rapid rollout—at the rate of roughly 200 to 300 POS terminals per week—is a feat the company attributes to meticulous planning by the project team, along with standardized, intuitive, straightforward design and comprehensive out-of-the-box features of Dynamics 365.

To offer the best customer experience, ABFRL set the bar high for performance—two seconds or less to add an item to a shopping cart at checkout, even with as many as 20 lines open. Of course, POS tends to slow down as line items increase and more pricing and promotion data is calculated. But Dynamics 365 Commerce meets the company’s need to ensure that checkout lanes are always operational for a swift consumer experience even during peak season. 

For brands such as Louis Phillipe, Van Heusen, Allen Solly and Peter England, ABFRL needs a POS solution that effortlessly integrates with its existing SAP system. The flexibility of Dynamics 365 met both scale and data complexity requirements, continuously synchronizing master data and sales transactions for hundreds of thousands of checkouts per day. Real-time data sync provides a complete, up-to-the-minute view of inventory, replenishment, and promotions to deliver improved accuracy, visibility, and collaboration to facilitate more timely decision making. The cloud-based solution makes processing sales transactions and viewing customer orders, not just possible at all times, but fast and seamless, too. And increased efficiencies that come from enhanced visibility have yielded improvements such as ship-from-store for ecommerce orders, reducing delivery time for customer orders originating from its branded websites and apps as well as online marketplaces.

Meeting customers where they are

Moving to the cloud has not only made business data more reliable, flexible, and available, it has enhanced ABFRL’s ability to drive business with pop-up stores, seizing opportunities to gain new customers. And with the Dynamics 365 Commerce mobile POS app, store associates and customers are no longer tethered to traditional queues and checkout processes. Instead, store associates use mobile devices to break up lines and check out customers anywhere in the store. Dynamics 365 Commerce makes it possible to do business anywhere, on any device, at any time.

ABFRL has expanded with a new business unit for ethnic-wear brands, acquiring and launching several designer and luxury brands including Sabyasachi, Shantnu and Nikhil, House of Masaba, Tarun Tahiliani’s - Tasva and artisanal brand, Jaypore. To quickly enable an integrated solution for these ventures, ABFRL runs end-to-end on Dynamics 365 Finance, Supply Chain Management and Commerce: store operations and POS. And with business data all in one place, managers have access to real-time reporting, making reaction times quicker and enhancing inventory visibility with easy stock transfers from distribution centers to stores. Every decision ABFRL makes to improve its customers’ experience can be executed and optimized with Dynamics 365. 

And when a customer has a question about an order, needs help finding the right color, has trouble with a payment, or simply wants to provide feedback, Dynamics 365 Customer Service supports ABFRL with case routing and management. More than 60,000 cases are created monthly for customer service requests received via web and WhatsApp chat, email, and phone channels, and from customer feedback surveys, submitted online or in stores on customer-facing tablets. Configurable rules automatically route each case to the right team for speedy resolution. With Dynamics 365 Customer Service customer inquiries are now resolved in minutes or hours instead of days, customer satisfaction scores have improved dramatically, and employee workload has reduced 50%.

Doing more with less 

More promos, bigger baskets

One of the most important success criteria in retail is increasing basket size. For a multi-brand, high-volume enterprise like ABFRL, promotions and speed of execution play a vital part in driving basket size and store revenue. The company employs a variety of complex pricing and promotions strategies. Dynamics 365 offers capabilities that enable innovative in-depth pricing offers and promotions to create differentiation in the market—capabilities like threshold discounts, one-to-many enhancements, and pooling combination offers, enticing shoppers to take advantage of deals and add to their basket. More promotions mean more access, and more access means increased basket size, a win for customers and retailer alike. 

Better service, lower cost

Cost savings haven’t come just from what Dynamics 365 adds, they’ve also come from what it takes away. Improved performance, reduced hardware, and streamlined data flow have significantly reduced service tickets and improved service levels, resulting in lower costs of operations and maintenance. And with periodic releases that keep the solution up to date with the latest capabilities, the business can innovate and keep pace with popular trends.

Queue-busting power

A great shopping experience can be ruined by long lines at checkout. By enabling checkout on multiple device form factors, ABFRL is making lines shorter and in some cases eliminating wait times altogether with tablet-based POS, mobile checkout, and e-receipts. Customers enjoy streamlined checkout thanks to seamless synchronization. 

Onboarding with ease

With an average store employee turnover rate of 20%–25%, ABFRL must onboard and train significant numbers of new POS users on a weekly basis. A solution that integrates its human resources management system, Azure Active Directory, and Dynamics 365 not only reduces the company’s security and administration effort and costs but makes onboarding, and off-boarding, faster and easier.

Increased order delivery speed

With Dynamics 365, 40% of ABFRL’s e-commerce orders—nearly 1 million in the last year—are ship-from-store, increasing order delivery speed by 50%–60%. That means customers receive their orders three to five days earlier than with the legacy system. And now the company is offering hyper-local delivery, too, with delivery times measured in hours instead of days for the best possible customer experience. 

The cloud is the limit

More customers will soon be able to enjoy a fast, reliable, and convenient shopping experience with ABFRL brands. Store network expansion is one of the key levers for business growth and thanks to Dynamics 365, expansion has never been easier. ABFRL onboards new brands quickly and easily using the solution and credits it with enabling its international expansion thanks to the ease of a common platform. Explains Praveen Shrikhande, Chief Digital and Information Officer, “We’re rolling out most of our new brand launches and acquisitions in four to six months. They are getting a single, end-to-end integrated platform. In the past, they would have had multiple tools: a separate inventory management, a separate system for accounting, and a separate POS. Now all of that’s coming together into a single system, streamlining the process end to end.” 

Looking ahead

New York City shoppers will now have the chance to experience one of ABFRL’s high-end luxury brands, Sabyasachi, in person at a new store in the US fashion capital. As with all ABFRL’s new stores and acquisitions, Dynamics 365 will run end-to-end to fully utilize insights and automation to provide exceptional customer experience.

Moving toward a single platform and a single view, extending Dynamics 365 with Customer Service Copilot to serve customers day or night and resolve queries even more quickly, and employing the omnichannel capabilities of Dynamics 365 Commerce will roll out the red carpet for ABFRL’s industry-leading customer experiences and operations. Ultimately, Dynamics 365 is helping ABFRL achieve its best look yet.