Informed Retailer Case Study

A rapidly growing multi-store operation

After more than 10 years in operation, Johnny’s Furniture has grown from its humble beginnings supplying furniture for 5‐star hotels in Melbourne, to expanding and operating 28 in‐trend and high quality furniture stores across Australia.

Despite rapid expansion, the company’s goals remain the same – to source the best quality product, think outside the box, and offer incredible deals to clientele.

In order to maintain their impressive growth and ongoing delivery of their brand promise, Johnny’s Furniture recognised that they needed more advanced software systems that could cope with the complexities of running a multi-store furniture retail operation.

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Moving Up From Vend HQ To Retail Express

As a small retailer in the early stages of business, Johnny’s Furniture adopted Vend as their POS software. Initially, the system was suitable, but as they expanded, they ran into more and more limitations that were holding back growth.

With Vend, manual processes were hurting performance, productivity and customer experience across all functions of their business – stores, warehouse, inventory planning, financial management, marketing, pricing, and general operational management.

After switching from Vend to Retail Express, Johnny’s Furniture has been able to deliver a superior customer experience, reduce lost sales and save 450 labour hours per week through an automated, optimised fulfilment process – capabilities that are critical to remain competitive in the furniture retailer space.

“We just reached a point where our current systems were limiting our growth, customer experience and efficiency. As we expanded there was a need for a system that could handle the complexity of multiple store furniture retail operations”

– Corey Davison, National Operations Manager

Fulfilment processes: From manual and error-prone to automated and real-time

With 70% of Johnny Furniture’s sales being pre‐orders from in‐transit containers of stock, a crucial part of the customer experience hinges on the goods being available for pick up or to be home delivered in an acceptable time frame.

A major part of the internal business effort is focused on managing the Estimated Time of Arrival (ETA) of goods into the warehouse and providing a commitment for the fulfilment date based on this.

With Vend, when staff members made a sale, there wasn’t an option to choose a source to fulfil from, forcing them to create manual transfers and phone the warehouse each time to check stock availability as well as the ETA for pickup or home delivery.

As a result, the store staff and warehouse were constantly on the phone. Not only preventing store staff from selling and servicing customers, but the warehouse were distracted from actually completing the receiving and fulfilling duties.

This equated to roughly 30 hours of staff phone calls per store per week and a total of 450 hours of labour time per week across the whole business.

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To make matters more complicated, stock that was already allocated to customers was being sold by store staff which led to stock not being available for the original customers when it was received and ready to be picked up or delivered to their home. This created a high number of demands for refunds, and fewer repeat sales from frustrated customers. Multiplying that by a growing number of stores meant the problems became even more costly and challenging.

It was identified by the management team that their systems needed to change to keep up with their growing business…

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Best-in-class fulfilment:
Saving 450 labour hours per week

After switching to Retail Express, store staff now have full, real‐time visibility of the supply chain status of each item a customer wants to order, with stock availability and an ETA for warehouse pickup or home delivery.

No phone calls are needed to the warehouse as store staff can confidently provide an accurate ETA using realtime data direct from Retail Express, giving customers a realistic, expectation of fulfilment.

The warehouse team now have real‐time reports for daily deliveries and pickups meaning they are now able to receive and pick stock in record time, which further improves fulfilment speed and the customer experience.

This means that 450 hours of staff time that were previously spent on phone calls each week are now completely saved and can be spent focusing on delivering an outstanding customer and nurturing repeat sales.

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Best-in-class customer experience

Retail Express has also created a more collaborative focus around best experiences for the customer, including better stock availability and fulfilment speed.

Sales staff can provide customers with the option for pickup or home delivery of items that have an earlier ETA ahead of the remaining items in their order. They can also easily check live stock availability in other locations and automatically create an internal transfer so that customers can get their goods quicker.

“The advanced features of Retail Express slash the unnecessary admin hours our store and warehouse teams were wasting on phone calls, while allowing our customers to get an accurate, (and usually faster) ETA. This is going to be central to our competitiveness – especially as we expand stores.”

– Corey Davison, National Operations Manager

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Optimising cash flow - expediting laybys & freeing up retail space

Before implementing Retail Express, a lack of visibility over the status of inventory meant stock for Laybys was actually available but store staff were not aware and therefore unable to contact customers to receive the goods and make their final instalment payments.

With Retail Express, store staff have instant, complete visibility of available stock, and can connect sooner to the customer to collect and pay for their goods.

By optimising warehouse pickup and home delivery, Johnny’s Furniture has also been able to move away from holding stock in store which frees up space to display more products which, in turn, generates more sales. And by using the automated replenishment system in Retail Express, they’re able to more accurately purchase the right products in the right quantities.

Since moving to Retail Express, Johnny’s Furniture had their best sales month in the company’s history!

‘This is a dream for both the salesperson and our business overall.
Store sales people can generate revenue just by looking at laybys that can now be fulfilled today. It means we are optimising our cash flow.’

– Corey Davison, National Operations Manager

The ultimate source of truth

With Retail Express, Johnny’s Furniture have reliable COGS data and the agility to adjust prices to balance competitiveness and maintain margins as changes occur in their supply chain.

With Retail Express, costs are constantly updated to reflect each stores cost of goods meaning the team at Johnny’s Furniture can make informed decisions and set optimum prices and promotional offers.

‘Before Retail Express, the costs we had in our system were at best a second guess. Now we know where we’re making good or bad margins based on up‐to‐date data and can confidently act on that’ says Corey.

All employees at Johnny’s Furniture now rely on Retail Express as their source of truth and each business function has seen the profound impact that has on business performance.

“Until you’ve seen and tried Retail Express you have no idea of what you’re missing out on with your current system. It’s been a game‐changer across every single part of our business. We would have made the move much earlier in our growth journey if we’d known such features were available in this software platform.”

– Corey Davison, National Operations Manager