Hosted ERP is best fit for Ted Baker
- Summary:
- Fashion retailer is entrusting new Microsoft ERP deployment to HP Enterprise Services under a seven-year managed services deal.
Earlier this month, the company announced double-digit revenue growth in both its wholesale and retail divisions for its most recent quarter (ending 8 November) - a performance that chief executive Ray Kelvin attributed, in part, to the company’s expanding international presence, which helped it to avoid the domestic weather woes experienced by rivals such as Superdry, Next and French Connection.
But forging ahead into new territories - the company launched its first outlet in Latin America during the quarter - brings its own challenges, not least for Ted Baker’s IT director, Dustan Steer.
As diginomica reported earlier this year, the company decided some time ago to replace its ageing Prologic CIMS ERP system with Microsoft AX. This week, HP Enterprise Services announced that it had been chosen by Ted Baker to host this new system under a seven-year managed services deal.
This week diginomica caught up with Steer to discuss the background and detail of this new agreement. He confirmed:
HP will be hosting our entire AX infrastructure. We’ve built the solution up in a couple of data centres in HP’s Swindon centre, with replication between the two, so that I’ve got failover in place for when the live environment goes down - well, if the live environment goes down.
It’s going to be monitored 24/7 by a full team of DBAs [database administrators] to ensure we’ve got as much uptime as humanly possible.
Uptime is a big issue when for a company with significant global operations and even bigger global ambitions. While the solution will be hosted in the UK, it will be used round the clock by a far-flung team, including warehouse managers in Hong Kong and finance and retail teams in Asia and the US.
Putting in place a hosting agreement that could rise to the challenge took some planning, Steer says.
We spent a lot of time asking ourselves whether we were striving for an unrealistic position in delivering all of our services out of the UK, but the general consensus was that we should be able to achieve that. [The choice] was either hosting in the UK or having multiple data centres with multiple live instances of AX around the world. It seemed that that would add a higher level of complexity to the whole solution that we didn’t feel we needed.
In or out?
That’s not to say, however, that Steer never considered hosting the ERP system in-house. He did, he confirms - in part because, after all, he and his team had hosted the older Prologic system at Ted Baker’s offices for many years:
But ultimately, through doing all the comparisons, we realised we couldn’t host it ourselves, because we wouldn’t have had the space to accommodate the servers that we needed.
If available space was an obstacle, so were concerns over the time and skills that an on-premise ERP deployment would demand, he adds:
The system should go live in early 2015 and, while both Steer and HP are planning a phased implementation, there’s still work to do on deciding how and when to take each module live. After all, the system will eventually be handling all product sourcing, product set-up and stock management for Ted Baker’s worldwide operations, as well as point-of-sale operations in its UK and European territories.We were also looking at the amount of headcount I would have needed to be able to do all the DBA work on the solution, particularly if I was supporting it 24/7, so that was a big plus-point in favour of giving it to someone else to maintain for us, because [HP] can throw the relevant resources at the solution at whatever hour of the day they’re needed.
What we’ve put in place needs to last us for ten years. Looking at where we are now as a company, and where we were ten years ago, and where we’re expecting to be in ten years’ time, we thought if we’re going to do this, we’re going to do it properly and go with a company that’s a real expert in this area.
So, in the face of such a big project, how does he prioritise, in terms of the order in which to take individual modules live? He laughs:
With great difficulty. We’re going live with finance first, because that’s the foundation of the whole system. From that point, though, it’s what best fits with our business processes and our business calendar. We’ve been coming at this from multiple angles. Do we start with the buying process, for example, and drive that forwards? Or do we roll-out by territory? I think it’s fair to say we haven’t completely decided on how the complete roll-out is going to take place.
Steer is certain on one point, however: the new ERP system, once in place, will provide a firm platform that will allow Ted Baker to build on its multinational, multi-channel ambitions.
Solid ERP is the foundation of having a modern omni-channel retail business, which is about total confidence in visibility of stock across all areas. So we need to get this new system bedded in, so that we can springboard off from there and explore that avenue as far as we can.