Today, the company operates in five African countries: Côte d’Ivoire, where they run seven stores, Cameroon, Congo, Gabon, and Senegal.
In 2021, the management team at Bernabé Côte d’Ivoire S.A. reviewed their commercial strategy to best meet their customers' requirements. The changes included redesigning their product range, developing new areas in-store where customers can relax, as well as launching a loyalty program. And because of their new strategy, the company decided it was also the right time to switch to a more modern, flexible retail system.
Business case
“The system we used lacked many essential functionalities and couldn’t connect our business processes together,” says Ali Termos, Director of Application Development and Delivery at Bernabé, “it also couldn’t support multiple store locations.” With the growth of the company and their product lines, they found it more and more difficult to manage their operations. It was especially difficult to manage a large inventory and identify which items they needed and in what quantities at different store locations. Each store ran as an independent entity, which caused logistic inefficiencies and affected the company's ability to deliver against the expectations of their customers. Besides the tedious inventory management processes, Bernabé couldn’t manage their business-critical operations, including sales and accounting.
Solution
With the help of LS Retail partner Dynamics Link in Egypt, Bernabé chose LS Retail software, a complete retail system that extends Microsoft Dynamics ERP. “We were looking for a solution that would allow all departments across the organization to work with the same data, with an architecture that would work both online and offline,” says Termos.
Bernabé decided to spend the time needed to achieve great results. Supported by the team at Dynamics Link, they performed:
- Application performance testing regarding sales orders and offers
- Customizations review to ensure the changes would not affect performance
- Data replication review
Shortly after, all Bernabé stores in Côte d’Ivoire went live with the new solution. “Having Dynamics Link as our partner gave us the edge,” says Termos, “they have a strong record of successful LS Retail implementations and their constant support helped us adopt those new processes with ease.”
Benefits
As soon as they implemented LS Retail software, Bernabé noticed positive effects. They could finally rely on accurate, real-time sales and inventory data, and use this data to make better business decisions. Now Bernabé enjoys:
- Automatic inventory updates - The company can track which items are available across their store locations and supply chain in real time. The staff can also easily transfer items from one store to the other while the software takes care of the calculations and planning.
- One complete overview - By having an end-to-end system, the company gets a complete overview of its business, and can track store performance directly from the head office. “Having all information centralized makes the decision-making process lot easier for us,” says Termos.
- Faster transactions – As a user-friendly, modern system, LS Retail software makes transactions in Bernabé’s stores smoother and faster than the old solution.
Bernabé has plans to expand its operations in Côte d’Ivoire by opening more locations, and with LS Retail software, they’ll get the benefits of a powerful solution that scales with their business.
