Each nursery is dedicated to maintaining a diverse and extensive stock, ensuring it meets customer needs and is available for immediate pickup or delivery. Additionally, customers looking to bring their garden projects to life can book a professional garden consultant for personalized advice and support.
Business case
Members of Home & Garden are committed to addressing challenges directly and providing exceptional service to their customers. However, manual management of purchasing, sales, and inventory can prove burdensome and detract staff from delivering superior customer care. When asked about what drove his company to change IT solutions, Michael Elnegaard, the CEO of Home & Garden responded that there was a strong need to:
- automate processes and reduce administrative work
- simplify data access for the nursery staff
- offer customers enticing benefits
Solution
After evaluating the available options on the market, Home & Garden quickly selected LS Retail’s POS and ERP solution, LS Central, renowned for its flexible and user-friendly interface. In LS Central, all data is consolidated into a single platform, instead of multiple separate systems across each store. This not only centralizes information but also bridges the gap between the company's physical and online stores, a strategic direction that Home & Garden sees as the path forward.
The company entrusted twoday, a leading LS Retail partner in Denmark, to carry out the implementation across all their nurseries.
Benefits
LS Central has empowered the staff at Home & Garden to streamline their operations, resulting in positive outcomes across all nurseries. "Thanks to our comprehensive solution, we now have everything we need at our fingertips - and it's making a significant difference,” says Elnegaard, “Our members have had a highly positive experience with the new system and realize how it simplifies our daily operations." Some of the implemented changes include:
- Barcode system. Home & Garden has introduced a barcode system for their checkout process, enabling staff to focus on serving customers. "Anyone can work at the checkout now,” says Elnegaard. “It has become much easier: employees only need to see the number of items the customers have with them, scan them, and then they can collect payment without worrying about whether they have chosen the right product category."
- Centralized information across nurseries. Items only need to be created once in the system, eliminating the need for each nursery to maintain it manually themselves, which simplifies everyone's job, and reduces the risk of human error.
- Real-time inventory and enhanced product availability. For nurseries with an affiliated webshop, LS Central ensures smooth synchronization of data between the webshop and the warehouse. This guarantees that customers won’t make unecessary trips for an item, only to realize later that it isn’t in stock. Once purchased, the inventory status of items is immediately updated, regardless of whether the purchase was made in-store or online, ensuring accurate availability across channels.
- Digitized bookkeeping with automated processes. Home & Garden also employs a range of Continia's products to maintain comprehensive control over all bookkeeping procedures. Thanks to the seamless integration of Continia with LS Central, the company has automated its entire bookkeeping function, significantly reducing manual data entry tasks, such as inventory management and bank reconciliation. As a result, members save considerable time and resources while experiencing a notable decrease in errors.
- Digitized warehouse processes. In nurseries, managing the constant flow of items requires constant attention. Previously, the rapid pace of operations often made manual processes overwhelming. With the adoption of an XtensionIT handheld warehouse scanner fully integrated with LS Central, Home & Garden has eliminated their reliance on paper. This integration has granted the company comprehensive visibility into its inventory, enabling precise tracking of purchases and sales. "The new mobile scanner solution allows us to easily receive and store items, while offering us valuable insights for planning future purchases and streamlining our operations," says Elnegaard.
Home & Garden has decided to run LS Central in the cloud as Software as a Service (SaaS). This ensures that their IT system remains constantly updated and operates on the latest version while avoiding the need for server maintenance and operation. Subsequently, system maintenance has become much simpler making it easier to use for Home & Garden's employees. SaaS solutions also offer flexibility and scalability, enabling easy adjustments according to the company's needs, which proves economically advantageous as they don’t have to worry about costly maintenance or upgrades.
There is great enthusiasm for the collaboration with twoday. A key factor to this positive collaboration is the effort from twoday in aligning expectations, coupled with their professional approach in initiating such a large project. “There has been a deep understanding of what we are going through, with ample time devoted to explaining how everything aligns," says Elnegaard.
"It is exciting what the future holds, but one thing is certain: Home & Garden has been through a long process, and the result is of great importance to the individual nurseries,” says Elnegaard, “they have saved considerable time on manual processes while gaining insight into their business operations and figures.”
