Completes Record Implementation with SAP Best Practice of SAP for Retail Solution in Philippines’ Top Budget Store Chain
Philippines — The EVER Retail Group, composed of EVER Supermarket, EVER Department Store, and HomeWorks, announced that its SAP for Retail solution successfully went live in a record implementation of three and a half months. Deployed across its headquarters, 7 supermarkets and 3 general hardware stores in the country, the SAP for Retail solution is expected to improve EVER’s productivity and create value by enabling operational excellence for its core retail business processes while delivering top-line revenue growth and cost reductions. This translates to better service for the retailer’s customers, who gain the assurance that their favorite products will always be available in EVER stores at affordable prices.
EVER partnered with SAP to address the need to significantly improve process efficiency, shorten cycle times, reduce costs and stock outages. The move is part of EVER’s efforts to prioritize customer responsiveness and time-to-market – a requisite in light of the economy’s influence on consumers’ buying habits and fierce competition in the marketplace. With the implementation of SAP, EVER’s buying and operation’s processes have become decentralized and each business unit became more responsible for its own result. With accurate and live data, each department can function independently and respond to store and customers’ needs effectively. Buying can execute auto replenishment and as a result, can focus on business and data building. Each store can purchase its own supplies and order them as needed. EVER’s SAP for Retail go-live period is a milestone for SAP Philippines and its Service and Channel partner CIBER Novasoft, having garnered the distinction as the fastest SAP Retail implementation in Asia Pacific. EVER licensed SAP in April this year and completed the implementation, from solutions blueprinting, applications integration to training in July.
“We needed a single, enterprise-wide IT platform to effectively manage the increasing scale and complexity of our operations as we continue to expand,” said EVER Vice President for Marketing and Purchasing Jonathan Go. “Our SAP rollout was not just an IT-driven endeavor. Rather, it was a business initiative to help us improve our key processes. We chose SAP over several of its leading competitors in the market for its retail expertise, solution scope, friendly user interface, and more importantly, its SAP Best Practices for Retail, which assured us of lower total cost of ownership (TCO), minimized risks and accelerated implementation – an assurance that became a reality faster than we ever expected. We selected CIBER Novasoft as our partner based on their international retail expertise as well as their delivery capabilities, which proved to be the correct decision from day one of their engagement. Due to the success of this SAP project, we plan to implement this in EVER’s other businesses such as mall operations, health care services and leisure resorts. ”
Ciber Novasoft implemented its novaRetail solution and headed the deployment that kicked off in early May. NovaRetail is Ciber Novasoft’s pre-configured retail specific solution, built upon SAP for Retail and Best Practices. Pre-defined business scenarios, solution prototypes and training materials are just some of the components of SAP Best Practices, ensuring EVER of concrete values and proven expertise.
“SAP has been very committed to the retail industry in the Philippines; thus, we are reinforcing our network of implementation partners and customers in this field. We also commend the SAP project team of EVER, who were very clear with what they wanted to achieve and collaborated closely with SAP Philippines and CIBER Novasoft to achieve this unprecedented implementation time frame. We look forward to helping EVER evolve their business and extend their leadership in the rapidly changing retail environment,” said Krish Datta, Managing Director, SAP Philippines. “Our partnership with EVER marks another milestone for SAP, as we celebrate 10 years of success in the Philippines. It gives us the opportunity to demonstrate the power of SAP for Retail in providing an end-to-end solution that will give real-time visibility, higher efficiency and increased agility to EVER.”
From both a functional and a technical perspective, novaRetail provided EVER with the tools, content, and methodology needed to implement and optimize its SAP for Retail solution in the quickest and easiest way possible by offering building blocks and the ‘roadmap’ for a fast implementation. The usage of handheld terminals also provided EVER a faster process execution at higher data quality.
“NovaRetail enables the implementation of complete core Retail functionality in dramatically less time with fewer people involved, resulting in predictable low-cost projects with a high ROI and making SAP for Retail affordable for most retailers. Truly ‘Ready to Run’ is the best way to characterize it.” said Guenter Winter, CEO of CIBER Novasoft Asia.
EVER joins the impressive list of SAP for Retail clients in the Philippines such as Supervalue, Sterling Paper and Penshoppe, as well as global customers The Home Depot, Migros, Boots, B&Q, Harrods (UK), Carrefour (Belgium), Sogo (Indonesia) and CK Tangs (Singapore).
