Gramedia turns the page with integrative technology in Dynamics 365

Gramedia began its journey in 1970 as a bookstore chain and is now the largest and most integrated retail and online bookstore in Indonesia. With more than 126 bookstores in 65 cities in 34 provinces and a workforce of more than 1,000—Gramedia promotes literacy, community, and education throughout the region. Gramedia is committed to providing superior customer service, which means meeting its customers wherever they are and creating community wherever it can, both online and in its bookstores.

“Born from a simple idea with a forward-looking vision, Gramedia has become a strategic part of Indonesia’s literature and book publishing industry. Providing relevant and flexible products, services, a business model and business processes that adapt with the times, Gramedia will always exist, grow, and flourish to inspire Indonesians.”

Priyo Utomo, CEO, Gramedia

Stacking up challenges

In 2017, Gramedia switched from an Oracle ERP to Dynamics AX 2012, both on-premises. The company had stacked multiple software solutions over the years to support purchasing options, vendor communications, product warehousing, and more, along with its primary enterprise resource planning (ERP) and e-commerce systems. After more than a decade of building out this ecosystem without connecting the services to a shared database, the system’s complexity began affecting operations and customer experiences. By 2021, growing inconsistencies in reporting data, increasingly complex intercompany transactions, inefficient inventory management, and high infrastructure maintenance costs persuaded leadership that it was time to modernize and harmonize the company’s systems.

After conducting a thorough internal review, leadership decided to address three key pain points in the short term:

No way to track intercompany stock movement, ordering processes, and sales attribution for consignment books. The publisher owns consignment books—books that are delivered to stores or warehouses for online and in-store fulfillment—until they’re sold. Gramedia didn’t have an adequate process to set, share, or edit consignment inventory tracking, sales, transfers between stores, returns, pricing, and discounts. This often caused inaccurate month-end reports, leading to extra manual research to resolve the issues—and sometimes, tension with Gramedia’s publishers.
Performance lags and no shift changeover in the desktop point-of-sale (POS) system. The in-store POS didn’t offer a way to accommodate shift changes. When one cashier finished a shift, and another took over, the departing cashier closed the till without a tender declaration. This caused transactions to be left out of the nightly report, leading to reconciliation issues at closing. In addition, the POS devices were beginning to have performance issues, slowing the checkout process for some customers.
No marketing data collection at checkout. The POS system wasn’t designed to capture marketing data for future customer communications. This made creating email or direct mail lists for in-store events very challenging, causing stores to miss sales opportunities and customers to miss meeting their favorite authors or attending a free event. Marketing efforts were more labor-intensive, more expensive, and less effective than they needed to be.

Once upon a technology

Facing a multifaceted modernization project with many external integrations, Gramedia’s IT leadership wanted to avoid changing the company’s core Dynamics AX 2012 ERP and Dynamics AX 2012 POS systems, both on-premises. While these tools generally worked well, they were aging and not the right solutions to unify all company data, entities, and stores. The company needed to upgrade the system to the latest Dynamics on-premises solution or find another option.

Leadership reached out to Microsoft and learned that the cloud-based Dynamics 365 would meet Gramedia’s digital transformation goals and business needs and create a centralized, secure location for all company data. Gramedia also learned that it qualified for strategic and migration guidance from the Microsoft FastTrack team.

Gramedia selected local, Jakarta-based Kreatif as its implementation partner. Kreatif not only spoke their language, literally, but offered service solutions for both retail and ERP as well. With this partnership in place, Gramedia decided to move to the Microsoft Cloud.

Drafting a solution

Over several months, Gramedia and Kreatif developed a plan that included 464 business requirements for 10 Gramedia business entities. The plan included the following requirements:

Upgrade Gramedia from on-premises Dynamics AX 2012 R3 to cloud-based Dynamics 365 Customer Insights, Commerce, Finance, and Supply Chain Management.
Integrate Gramedia.com with Dynamics 365 for accurate accounting and supply chain management. This was important, since some books are published by Gramedia (including e-books purchased through app stores and ePerpus textbooks), and others are produced by foreign publishers.
Upgrade bookstores from Dynamics AX 2012 POS to the Dynamics 365 Commerce POS and integrate the custom mobile POS app for on-the-go checkout options and the Grago mobile POS app used for ordering merchandise transfers between stores.
Connect store POS devices to the Electronic Data Capture (EDC) payment terminal, along with the CashLez payment provider for debit and credit cards.
Integrate platforms like Jubelio middleware for marketplace sales from Shopee, Tokopedia, and TikTok Shop, and loyalty software MyValue, which captures rewards and points in Dynamics 365 Commerce and shares them with Dynamics 365 Customer Insights.

Expected benefits for Gramedia after the launch of Dynamics 365

Going to print

The modernization project launched in April 2022 with a hard go-live date of May 1, 2023.

To achieve Gramedia’s goals and ensure a successful go-live, a rock-solid implementation blueprint and schedule were required. This would include data clean-up, a huge migration of data to Dynamics 365, integrations of app functionalities, testing, training, cutover, and more—along with participation and commitment from everyone involved at Kreatif, Gramedia, and the Microsoft FastTrack team.

Best-selling benefits

True to the plan, the project went live on time and on budget—quite a feat for a project with so many components, processes, and integrations. It ultimately involved 126 retail stores processing more than 250,000 sales per day, 180,000 online sales per day, and an inventory of more than 3.5 million items. Gramedia leadership was thrilled with the results. Benefits began to be felt immediately across the organization. As Silvester Budihardjo, System and Development Department Manager, Gramedia, explains it, “Now, we can easily develop more valuable solutions and strengthen business processes and systems with Dynamics 365.”

Harmonized inventory and accounting management

Gramedia and publishers now enjoy seamless movement of consignments and real-time inventory updates between stores and the online channel. New intercompany processes, from transfers to invoicing, iron out earlier inconsistencies and reporting discrepancies.

Improved vendor collaboration through supply chain visibility

With integrated purchase orders, accounts receivable and payable, and intercompany transfer processes, Gramedia and its publishers and vendors can now access invoices showing stock status, change requests, prices, discounts, and more. Invoices can be accepted or rejected in the system, saving time on emails and phone calls to resolve questions.

Smoother in-store operations and customer experiences

The new POS system facilitates seamless shift changes and proper till management. New member sign-ups during checkout send contact information directly into Dynamics 365 Customer Insights, enriching customer data for future touchpoints.

Relationship-building marketing campaigns

The game-changing collection and integration of customer data now facilitates segmented email campaigns for location-specific events, automated postings to social media accounts, and more efficient event planning.

Timesaving, automated financial transactions

Features like auto-billing based on contract terms and auto-invoicing for approved events, purchases, or sponsorships save valuable time for the accounts payable and receivable teams.

“Now, we can easily develop more valuable solutions and strengthen business processes and systems with Dynamics 365.”

Silvester Budihardjo, System and Development Department Manager, Gramedia

The next chapter

Gramedia's journey with Dynamics 365 has just begun, conducted by Yosef Adityo (IT & HR General Manager Gramedia), but the leadership team was so impressed with the rollout that they’re already looking forward to adding more functionality. Plans to incorporate Sales, Customer Service, and Azure Synapse Analytics for data warehousing are in discussion. A little further down the road, the team hopes to incorporate Copilot for Dynamics 365 to further improve productivity and enhance analytics with AI-driven insights.

The tagline for Gramedia translates to “Transforming Your Ideas,” and it continues to find new ways to do just that. Priyo Utomo, CEO of Gramedia, sums up the company’s vision this way: “Born from a simple idea with a forward-looking vision, Gramedia has become a strategic part of Indonesia’s literature and book publishing industry. Providing relevant and flexible products, services, a business model and business processes that adapt with the times, Gramedia will always exist, grow, and flourish to inspire Indonesians.”