Retail Management Integration Drives Customer Experience Success
By Erin Harris, editor-in-chief, Innovative Retail Technologies
National Roper’s Supply launched its new retail management system at a major industry event and generated nearly 12 months of sales in seven days.
National Roper’s Supply (NRS), formerly known as David’s Western Store, is a multichannel Western lifestyle retailer, offering everything from team roping supplies to apparel, boots, hats, and furniture. Now in its 25th year of business, NRS has grown exponentially since it first opened its doors. The retailer operates three brick-and-mortar locations, an e-commerce site, as well as a thriving catalog channel. Kerrie Thornton, purchasing manager at NRS, explains how integrating a realtime retail management system gave the company cross-channel visibility it needed to grow the business.
“We had outgrown our existing retail management system, plain and simple,” says Thornton. The system we had been using was designed for a business much smaller than ours. It was an efficient tool for the company when we were of a certain size, but the business had grown to the point where we exceeded the tool’s capacity to help us.” Thornton explains that in addition to brick-and-mortar limitations, the Web tool did not provide the functionality NRS needed to deliver a robust e-commerce platform. Further, most tasks required a fair amount of manual customization, as even choosing sizes was a laborious chore.
POS Integration Critical To Customer Experience
About four years ago, NRS chose Celerant Command Retail as its new retail management system. Thornton explains that the retailer needed a solution that tied together brick-and-mortar, Web, warehouse, and call center efforts. The NRS executive team unanimously chose Celerant from a list of five contenders, citing Celerant’s solid base applications and its ability to easily develop customizations that facilitated its business processes as the reason for selection. “In addition to seamless integration of our e-commerce initiative, Command Retail had the best features for inventory setup in our environment, which enables efficiencies in our picking and packing operations,” says Thornton.
