With a deep passion for exceptional quality and gourmet cuisine, the company specializes in importing the finest culinary specialties from around the globe.

Business case

Gourmet & Co operates through three distinct departments: retail, kitchen, and wholesale. “We needed a holistic system to unify all our departments on one single platform,” says Delphine Wong, Managing Director of Gourmet & Co. The company sought a POS and ERP system that would:

• Enable them to see inventory for each department in real time.
• Facilitate inventory transfers between departments.
• Collect customer information to effectively target marketing efforts.
• Enable the creation of discount offers to attract customers.
• Connect finance and accounting functions for efficient bookkeeping, including posting to various accounts, managing fixed asset purchases, and tracking depreciation.

Solution

After evaluating several software solutions, LS Central was selected for its comprehensive retail functionalities and the fact that it can work seamlessly with Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central ERP.

The implementation was successfully managed by LS Retail partner A1 Dynamics, primarily through remote collaboration, which introduced new learning methods for the staff. “A1 Dynamics provided a sandbox environment where our staff could experiment without the risk of breaking anything,” says Wong. With this approach, A1 Dynamics successfully rolled out the system in just three months, including staff training.

Gourmet & Co was extremely satisfied with the services provided by A1 Dynamics. “They understood our business model and the challenges we faced in staying current with developments in our industry,” says Delphine. “In response, they created tailored solutions that gave us insight into how other market leaders were addressing similar issues.”

A1 Dynamics made several customizations to fully address the company's unique needs.

During the Christmas season, the kitchen department typically takes orders that require customers to make a deposit, which varies depending on the order size. A1 Dynamics leveraged the Deposit Item feature in LS Central, allowing customers to easily redeem their deposit when they come to collect their order and pay the remaining balance.

Additionally, Gourmet & Co often sells gift baskets that include various products. “We can select the items that need to be included in the gift baskets and LS Central allows us to create assembly orders for our staff to put these baskets together,” says Delphine.

Benefits

With LS Central, Gourmet & Co has been able to streamline all retail, wholesale, and kitchen operations under a single platform. Some of the key advantages they mention include:

• Simplified data management. LS Central has eliminated data integration and replication issues by consolidating all business information within a single system. This ensures seamless data flow between departments and locations, improving overall operational efficiency. By combining multiple aspects of their business into a single software solution, Gourmet & Co saves time, improves accuracy, and enhances its ability to meet customers’ needs effectively.
• Access to real-time data. With LS Central, the company gets real-time visibility into their stock and sales information across all locations, which makes it easier to quickly answer inventory questions and ensure product availability.
• Efficient inventory management. LS Central makes managing inventory across multiple locations much easier. The Physical Journal and Transfer Journal functionalities allow the company to track their inventory movements accurately and in real time, ensuring they maintain optimal stock levels without running into stockouts or overstocking.
• Enhanced customer engagement. Each customer now has an individual account in the system, which enables them to earn rewards points with every purchase. The customer can redeem these points after having reached a certain purchase level. With this information, the management team at Gourmet & Co can see what customers are buying and who their returning customers are. This gives the company valuable insights into customer preferences and behaviors and helps them tailor promotions and communication strategies.
• Flexible and targeted promotions. LS Central has empowered the company to implement dynamic promotions with ease, significantly boosting both customer satisfaction and sales. Whether it is product-specific discounts or category-wide offers, the system allows Gourmet & Co to set up diverse promotional campaigns, such as Buy One, Get One Free or bundled deals.
• Effortless product and price information management. Configuration packages in Business Central simplify importing, exporting, and updating large volumes of data, making it faster and reducing manual entry errors. Uploading extensive product details is now quicker and more efficient, and standardized price labels can be generated with “It is as easy as pressing a button to create price labels,” says Delphine.
• User-friendly, intuitive system. LS Central's POS interface is highly intuitive, making staff training quick and easy. “The training of our staff was a breeze,” says Delphine.

Gourmet & Co is enthusiastic about its future and the growth potential with eCommerce. The company plans to leverage LS Central’s eCommerce add-on to connect their online and physical stores and more easily process online orders with one system. “A1 Dynamics is always proactive in identifying our needs and developing effective solutions,” says Delphine.