A garden center and plant nursery may seem like a seasonal business, but Merrifield Garden Center is continuously evolving to meet the needs of its customers no matter the time of year.
Since its humble beginnings in 1971, Merrifield has flourished into one of the largest full-service garden center, nursery, and landscaping companies in its region, employing more than 600 individuals and comprising over 70 acres of plants, property, and storefront in northern Virginia. Its business includes three brick-and-mortar locations carrying plants, gardening supplies, and home and holiday décor; an online store; a wholesale division that supports other local landscape contractors; a materials production division that recycles materials from landscaping jobs; and a line of private-label products tailored specifically for the environmental conditions in the greater Washington, D.C. area.
Clearly, the business has expanded and evolved over the years to meet changing industry and customer standards, but its founding principles of providing the highest quality customer services and unparalleled plant and product selection remain steadfast. The same is true for the systems supporting the products and services in Merrifield’s retail operations. With its omnichannel strategy, it’s critical that Merrifield delivers a consistent, seamless, and personalized experience across all its customer touchpoints.
Blooming into a modern, tech-savvy enterprise
Luckily, CFO Lynn Warhurst has made it one of her personal goals to bring technology into the company since joining in 1978. “There was zero technology…so we knew going forward that if we wanted to grow and be successful, we needed to change something,” she said.
After coming across SAP at an NRF event in the early 2000s, Merrifield went live with SAP ERP Central Component (SAP ECC) in 2013 to replace its 20-year-old garden center legacy system, providing the company with modern audit trail capabilities and increased data reliability.
Continuing its long-standing innovation journey and partnership with SAP, Merrifield is now transitioning its SAP ECC system to the cloud with SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition, retail, fashion, and vertical business.
Merrifield Garden Center sees up to 300 transactions per hour per location, Warhurst said, and so the company needed a solution with enhanced processing speeds that can handle a high volume of retail transactions. What’s more, the company also wanted a system that supports Apple Pay and Google Pay, has customer loyalty tracking and data analytics capabilities, and ensures enterprise security and compliance.
Merrifield also wanted to bring together its retail and wholesale divisions onto one platform as opposed to hosting them on fragmented solutions. “We knew [SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition] could handle our complexity and give us the detail we needed to run and grow our business,” Warhurst said. “After 54 years in business, both divisions will run on the same platform. It’s very exciting that we can interchange cashiers for retail and wholesale, which means being more efficient as a company.”
SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition, retail, fashion, and vertical business is a new solution introduced in January of this year. Built specifically for retailers, the ERP solution is tailored to the industry’s unique complexities around scaling, merchandising, store operations, and supply chains. The flexibility of its public cloud architecture helps unify and integrate industry-specific processes with out-of-the-box integrations.
Merrifield is also implementing SAP Omnichannel Sales Transfer and Audit to help ensure the completeness of sales transactions across multiple channels, improve data reporting, and comply with local regulations.
Strong partnerships build a foundation for success
To facilitate its cloud transformation, Merrifield engaged Syntax as its implementation partner. “Having a trusted partner is very important,” Warhurst said, explaining that Merrifield has worked with Syntax since 2018.
For the move to SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition, retail, fashion, and vertical business, Syntax came on-site to Merrifield to experience its current system first-hand and better understand what the business sees as mission-critical during this transformation, Warhurst said. Together, they identified solution provisioning and integration, data migration, and business continuity as priorities. With this insight, Syntax is working with SAP to integrate any remaining project gaps into an upcoming solution release in August.
“Syntax and SAP have been great. We are one of the first to go public cloud for retail and they have been there for us,” Warhurst said. “It was very important to find somebody who believed in us and was there for us, and I feel that that’s really one of the most important things for our success.”
While the new system is projected to go live in September, the project is currently in the configuration and realization stage and Merrifield is excited for the future. Adopting this holistic, omnichannel, cloud-based solution will help the garden center achieve its goals of expanding into more locations and online offerings by having trusted, complete data from across its divisions available in one place.
Gillian Hixson is an integrated communications specialist at SAP.
Top image courtesy of SAP employee Tom Lennart-Krupp.
