your journey
Pets at Home | Retail
High street retailer Pets at Home contacted Limelight in order to assist with a programme of work to facilitate their digital journey and leverage new benefits and capabilities into their business.
Pets at Home wanted to extend and expand their SAP footprint to consolidate legacy systems and take advantage of integration aspects around an ERP. They contacted Limelight to help frame a programme of work which included delivering benefits in and around HR and Payroll, helping to professionalise the promotional aspects for the group, improving the groups financial forecasting capability and shoring up the SAP estate through SAP Solution Manager.
Problem
Pets at Home had a number of legacy systems they wanted to consolidate into their SAP ERP instance, leveraging cost savings through infrastructure and bringing new capabilities and benefits to the group. The legacy payroll was plagued with errors which needed manual intervention each month, and there were business scenarios that needed to be catered for manually. From a commercial viewpoint retail promotions are often complex and Pets at Home had identified a number of challenges in managing and coordinating the group wide promotional landscape in an onmi-channel world. In conjunction with the promotional challenge, the group had identified a need to improve the financial forecasting for each of the business units and stores - moving away from error prone spreadsheets.
Running parallel to the business work, the group decided to update their SAP infrastructure to the latest SAP HANA technology. They also identified a need to control the estate more closely, to allow support teams to spot warning signs before they became issues and provide greater resilience to the group.
"One of our key considerations was how to support multiple partners. The team provided a great COE framework for us."
Insights
The final programme of work included: -
- SAP Payroll and Human Capital Managment (HCM) to delivery the payroll benefits (moving eventually to SuccessFactors)
- Implementing SAP Promotions Management for Retail (PMR) and the Customer Activity Repository (CAR) to help improve the promotions challenge
- Deploying SAP Business Planning & Consolidation (BPC) to improve the groups financial forecast capabilities
- Upgrading the legacy SAP instance to Business Suite on HANA, ensuring hardware selection was optimal and future proof.
- Shoring up the estate with SAP Solution Manager and activating various process monitoring to provide resilience capabilities.
Solutions
The Limelight team worked to help Pets at Home deploy numerous new modules into their SAP estate. This started by framing the vision, articulating the benefits and defining business cases. Once approved, the Limelight team conducted vendor selection processes and ensured that the cost/quality/capability balance was achieved in each of the areas and that all supplier understood their roles, scope and any integration challenges to be overcome.
Clearly deploying the numerous new technologies had lots of business change challenges, of which Limelight assisted the Pets at Home team to embed the 'new' normal.