Manor AG: driving omnichannel agility with Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations

“Whenever you undertake initiatives like this, the key is being bold and being restless. You can’t build a platform and just stop there. You have to keep growing. And find more and more ways to innovate.”

Roberto Fedele, CIO at Swiss department store chain Manor AG, is discussing innovation at his company and the flagship ERP platform that’s helping to foster it. 

“Manor AG started out, over a century ago, as a traditional brick-and-mortar retailer, but today we’re so much more than that,” says Fedele. “We like to see ourselves as an omnichannel organization, with a growing online presence and a deeply rooted history.” 

Combining these two aspects – modern, technology-enabled services and a strong retail legacy – is something that Fedele and Manor see as crucial to the company’s future. That’s why in recent years, Manor have launched a mammoth digitalization program aimed at expanding Manor’s customer experience and reach, as well as optimizing operations for resilience and efficiency. 

Started in 2016, the project has rapidly evolved from a simple migration to a wider supply chain optimization initiative centered around data, cloud technology and automation. All with help from Microsoft. 

“Technology is radically transforming the retail sector, pushing even the most traditional retailers to innovate and evolve to keep up with new trends,” he says. 

“This is why this project has been so exciting. From customer experience to the supply chain, re-stocking activities to pricing, we’ve built a platform that allows us to increase our agility and resilience, and benefit from intelligent automation to drive operational efficiency gains. For example, automatic replenishment of goods, which allows us to have the right number of products at the right time in-store. It’s a platform we can use as foundation for everything we want to achieve in the future.”

From bricks-and-mortar to tech-driven retailer

The largest department store chain in Switzerland, Manor AG owns some 60 stores across the country and sells over a million items across groceries, fashion, beauty and more. 

With such a broad ecosystem of suppliers, manufacturers and consumers depending on them, a key strategic focus for Manor has been to migrate key on-premises legacy systems to Microsoft Dynamics 365, as part of an effort to be more resilient and efficient. 

“In 2016, we started our most significant transformation in 30 years with one main goal: to leave our tradition as a bricks-and-mortar business behind and embrace a more tech-driven approach,” says Fedele. 

“Before then, everything was built on-prem and we had a set of very old applications that were limiting our ability to scale our ERP platform, to offer new services and expand. We needed a platform that could scale up alongside the development of the company. Microsoft Dynamics offered the most convincing Total Cost of Ownership for us.”

Transforming the supply chain end-to-end

Manor AG now has a fully functioning ERP platform that runs on Microsoft Dynamics 365  Finance and Operations and cloud technology. In use as a cloud-based Software-as-a-Service platform, the solution also relies on Microsoft Azure and Azure Gateway for the integration of other applications.

“Our new ERP system is designed to improve the flow of goods with automation, spanning several different parts of our value chain,” says Fedele. 

“This has allowed us to optimize a wealth of operations that include procurement, sales, pricing, auto-replenishment, monitoring of stock levels and so much more.” 

The ability to calculate demand and execute replenishment is particularly important,” he says. “As a retailer, the worst thing that can happen to you is running out of stock or not having the right products at the right place and time, when a customer demands them,” he comments. 

“Thanks to this platform, we now have far greater control over this process, and we can make adjustments to our product availability much more accurately.

“It is orchestrating product availability across all our channels: online, at point of sale (POS) in-store, and for specific omni-channel offerings like Click + Collect or Click + Collect Express,” he adds.

Amongst the flagship initiatives that the platform has made possible is a trickle feed functionality that allows Manor to continuously process sales orders, invoices and payments. As a result, inventory, revenue and payments are updated in near-real-time. 

“This functionality is largely facilitating the way we work with data or with complex data flows, allowing us to deliver greater value in our data reporting environment,” he says, detailing current plans to expand it even further. 

“And now we’re moving that functionality another step ahead towards advanced planning optimization, which will help to understand demand even more precisely.”

A mobile application for the retailer of the future

Beyond these capabilities, Manor has used its platform to improve the online experience and promote a mobile-first way of working amongst its workforce. 

“We currently use a handheld, mobile application at all our stores, which employees use to process orders, check on the inventory and so on,” says Fedele. “To empower them, we partnered with Be-Terna to create Be-Mobile, our mobile app running on Dynamics 365.” 

Be-Mobile is a bespoke solution with which staff can use tablets in-store to help inform customers and refer to products online, place orders to suppliers or process product transfers among stores or from/to distribution centres as well as provide a mobile checkout for a smoother retail experience. “The goal was always to reach everybody as directly as possible with the core features that we have for the goods management,” he continues. 

“And we believe that our mobile application is a fundamental piece to that.”

Much more than a simple migration

As Manor continues to migrate more legacy systems to the platform and expand its functionalities, the company knows it has only just embarked on its broader digital transformation journey. 

“We’ve already achieved so much from our initiative, but we're far from being where we'd like to be in the coming years,” says Fedele. “We need to speed up our digital acceleration and start making even more of our solutions.”

This, he says, starts with data. “Data has really changed us in a fundamental way,” he explains. “Before, all our data was stored in internal data warehouses and was giving us a largely reduced amount of insights.

“Today, Power BI has really changed things for us. We can now do quite sophisticated data analytics with Azure Databricks and continue our Big Data implementation, opting for Azure solutions.”

At a time when traditional retailers are increasingly struggling to cope with new trends and demands, he says that having such a strong platform in place has helped Manor to become more resilient and future-proof. 

“We're definitely more resilient than before,” he concludes. “Our platform may still be far from complete, but we already have a strong digital backbone that’s making us flexible, innovative and ever more ambitious. 

“We’re ready for whatever the future holds for us.”