Outdoor Sports Retailer Boosts Sales Through BI & Automation

April 15, 2019

Grady’s Great Outdoors achieves just-in-time fulfillment and boosts bottom line with integrated platform solution

Competing in a sportsman’s paradise like Anderson, South Carolina, requires a thorough knowledge of the all the recreational opportunities the area affords—which is something that Grady’s Great Outdoors provides. For more than 50 years, the outfitter has worked hard to keep up with the region’s growth and the new demands of digital marketing, but the brand needed help maintaining their own steady growth through improved inventory and sales management.

Struggling with Sales Visibility

Grady’s was struggling with a lack of true visibility into the sales velocity of its merchandise, reordering out-of-stock products without a clear understanding of how much merchandise the store was capable of selling. This meant that the business was unable to optimize inventory levels, unequipped to predict the upward potential of sales volume for individual SKUs and unable to place orders until minimum volume thresholds were met.

Grady’s team members also spent too much time counting inventory and manually writing purchase orders, and they didn’t have any insight into their competitors’ top selling items. Some of the company’s key issues were supporting inventory management, keeping records, maintaining on-hand merchandise without overstocking and balancing their needs with shifting offerings from vendors.

A Much-Needed Automation Solution

A simple solution for all of Grady’s ongoing challenges relieved its team of SKU record keeping and manual purchase order creation by automating processes with Stratus Retail, an advanced retail technology solution provided by Celerant Technology.

This technology offered the company a single platform for point of sale, CRM, inventory and warehouse management, ERP/back office and fulfillment processing. It allowed Grady’s to set inventory thresholds and track current levels and sales and then let the technology take over, automatically detecting statuses and creating new purchase orders to send to fulfillment, which saved personnel hours of work each day.

The best part is that automatic ordering can happen anytime and does not require minimums from the distributor. Regardless of how much or little volume I need, the system automatically orders the right amount as frequently as needed, even daily. . . . It’s the perfect model of just-in-time inventory fulfillment.”- John Phillips, President, Grady’s Great Outdoors

Easy Integration & Business Intelligence

Stratus Retail’s inventory automation and vendor integration capabilities allowed Grady’s to convert average selling items to big sellers. The platform supports bench-marking by automatically pulling sales data and sending it anonymously to distributors to share with other retailers. This gives the company access to their own competitive insights into well-performing products from similar retailers around the country. A valuable business intelligence tool, Stratus Retail helped Grady’s identify SKUs that turn into big hits among their target consumers.

Vendor integration gives me a window into market demand, and ensures I am serving customers with what they want, when they want it.”- John Phillips, President, Grady’s Great Outdoors

One Platform, Endless Insights

Working with Celerant and a single platform solution didn’t just improve Grady’s Great Outdoors’ bottom line, but it also made its customers happier because they noticed a change in product availability and saw Grady’s as their one-stop shop for all their outdoor needs. Adopting a multi-channel retail software solution paved the way for future growth while also revealing immediate, short-term advances in sales and customer satisfaction.

Taking advantage of the sales potential for merchandise has helped boost our bottom line and improve satisfaction from customers who always find what they are looking for.”- John Phillips, President, Grady’s Great Outdoors

Want more details about Grady’s Great Outdoors’ experience with Celerant and Stratus Retail? Download the full case study below to learn more today and get a free demo of the industry’s #1 ranked retail software if you’re ready to see how it can work for your company.