Bosley's Microsoft Dynamics Case Study

Bosley’s Pet Food Plus is a leading pet store and provider of premium brand pet foods, accessories, and supplies for dogs, cats, birds and small animals. The company used Microsoft Dynamics® GP alongside Microsoft Dynamics RMS and Candlewest Systems implementation expertise to dramatically increase their efficiencies as an organization. As Bosley’s expanded its line of retail stores, it needed to streamline data processing and scale its analysis and reporting capabilities to prepare for continued growth. Candlewest Systems, a Microsoft® Gold Certified Partner, helped Bosley’s tailor Microsoft Dynamics GP and Microsoft Dynamics RMS to extend the functionality of its business solution. With a simplified and fully integrated business solutions infrastructure, Bosley’s saves tens of thousands each year and benefits from faster reporting, increased efficiency, and improved collaboration with their retail stores.

Situation

Bosley’s Pet Food Plus owns and franchises retail locations in the Lower Mainland and surrounding areas in BC.

Over the last years, Bosley’s Pet Food Plus had been experiencing significant growth, by adding a considerable amount of new retail locations while expanding its annual revenue.

Distribution Requirements
With more than 20 retail locations to monitor, supply chain logistics were starting to become unmanageable. A lack of visibility into local stores’ inventory made things even worse. To process purchase order transactions originating at their retail stores, accounting personnel at Bosley’s Pet Food Plus used a custom application to integrate the retail stores’ purchase orders to the head office distribution system.  The application was cumbersome to use causing delays in the replenishment of stores inventory.

Custom software was also being used to accommodate the bulk picking requirements of  Bosley’s. The in house custom software was difficult to use, resulting in inefficiencies in both the generation of picking tickets and the invoicing of shipped orders.

Bosley’s centralized purchasing department frequently had to prepare and analyze extensive data in stand-alone Microsoft® Office Excel®  spreadsheets in order to establish purchase requirements, which would end in substantial duplication of data entry. Bosley’s found in the long term that this approach did not meet the company’s increasing need for high-volume data input, and resulted in ever-increasing effort in order to ensure that  inventories were replenished in a timely manner. It was vitally important for the growth of the company that Bosley’s find a way to more efficiently process the material requirements planning going forward and shorten the procurement lead time.

Solution

Bosley’s Pet Food Plus ultimately decided to build on the strength of Microsoft Dynamics GP and extend the solution through the latest version of GP, additional modules, and the latest integration tools. Rather than take on the heavy risks and costs involved in moving to a new system, Bosley’s invested in the flexibility of Microsoft Dynamics GP and other Microsoft technologies. Bosley’s solution came about through the flexibility and adaptability of Microsoft Dynamics GP, the tight integration with Microsoft BI tools, Office, and tools such as Econnect. Candlewest Systems worked closely with the Bosley’s to define a strategy to meet their requirements.

Transaction Processing & Visibility
In order to reduce data input and provide visibility throughout the organization, through Microsoft toolsets, Candlewest built an e-Connect based integration piece between GP and RMS that allowed Bosley’s to synchronize master items between the two systems and integrate store purchase orders into GP Sales Order Processing. This allowed Bosley’s to automatically create new items and update existing items at the retail store level without duplicate data entry. What essentially was a three step process became a one step process. Bosley’s Pet Food Plus also took advantage of eConnect for Microsoft Dynamics GP to quickly and accurately merge inventory data provided by suppliers (supplied and maintained in Office Excel spreadsheets) into the Microsoft Dynamics GP database. EConnect now helps Bosley’s accelerate the transfer of hundreds of records a day into Microsoft Dynamics GP with its built-in business logic. Data from retail stores is now instantly available to managers and helps facilitate timely communication with all the retail locations.

Improved Distribution Capabilities
As part of its initiative to streamline operations, the company also obtained the Dynamics GP Advanced Distribution module in Microsoft Dynamics GP. With the Microsoft Dynamics GP Advanced Distribution Module, Candlewest tailored Dynamics GP so that Bosley’s could quickly pick, update and easily transmit updated pick quantities. 

Automated Reporting
Bosley’s further capitalized on the flexibility of the Microsoft tools to streamline its procurement reporting functions. This substantially helped the company reduce time consuming manually consolidated procurement reports. The use of Microsoft’s SQL Server Reporting Services reports allowed for consolidated reporting from GP and RMS. Bosley’s can now easily create consolidated procurement reports. Bosleys is now able to create procurement reports that take into consideration items such as quantity of inventory at head office, outstanding POs to their suppliers, corporate sales to stores, retail sales at store levels and quantity on hand at store levels.  

Bosley’s also took advantage of Smartlist Builder in Microsoft Dynamics GP, a tool that lets workers create predefined information queries. With Smartlist Builder employees across Bosley’s Pet Food Plus can now quickly pinpoint and extract only the information they need to complete a given reporting task. Because of the seamless integration between Microsoft Dynamics GP and the 2007 Microsoft Office system, employees can export information directly to Office Excel 2007 and even select report templates in Office Excel 2007 based on commonly used SmartLists.

Benefits

With Microsoft Dynamics GP, Microsoft Dynamics RMS, BI Tools, and Microsoft’s Integration Suite, Bosley’s was able to streamline it’s procurement and distribution processes and is now able to complete reporting tasks in less time, resulting in savings of thousands of dollars annually. 

Through Candlewest Systems expertise and broad knowledge of Microsoft Dynamics systems, Bosley’s Pet Food Plus was able to significantly streamline the replenishment of inventory, substantially improve picking time, shorten the invoicing cycle, and receive real time procurement reporting.

Microsoft Dynamics
Microsoft Dynamics is a line of integrated, adaptable business management solutions that enables you and your people to make business decisions with greater confidence. Microsoft Dynamics works like familiar Microsoft software such as Microsoft Office, which means less of a learning curve for your people, so they can get up and running quickly and focus on what’s most important. And because it is from Microsoft, it easily works with the systems that your company already has implemented. By automating and streamlining financial, customer relationship, and supply chain processes, Microsoft Dynamics brings together people, processes, and technologies, increasing the productivity and effectiveness of your business, and helping you drive business success. 

For more information about Microsoft Dynamics, go to:
www.candlewest.com

Solution Overview

Organization Profile

Based in Richmond, BC, Bosley’s Pet Food Plus is a leading pet store providing pet owners with a large variety of premium brand pet foods. With over 23 locations Bosley’s has established itself as highly trained and knowledgeable pet specialty store.

Business Situation

To keep pace with rapid growth and meet sophisticated procurement reporting requirements, the company needed to streamline its IT infrastructure and provide management with simplified access and visibility across all variety of business systems. 

Solution

With help from Candlewest Systems, a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner, Candlewest Systems modified, extended and implemented Microsoft Dynamics GP 10 and Microsoft Dynamics RMS to meet Bosley’s business needs.

Benefits

• Saves tens of thousands yearly
• Drives greater productivity
• Accelerates transaction processing

Partner(s)
Microsoft Gold Partner, Candlewest Systems

Software and Services
Microsoft Dynamics GP
Microsoft Dynamics RMS
Microsoft Integration Tools
Microsoft Smartlist Builder

Vertical Industries
Retail

Country/Region
Canada