Harrods integrates back office with SAP

Harrods has completed a full SAP enterprise resource planning implementation that should harmonise back-office functions when dealing with the retailer's different internal businesses.

The iconic department store offers a mix of merchandise from luxury foods to high fashion. It also makes its own food products. These businesses have very different requirements in terms of purchasing and replenishing stock - and have up to now relied on separate legacy systems, which demand a high back-office overhead.

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Harrods IT director David Llamas said: "SAP allows us to integrate common accounting processes and gives us one version of the truth."

Although Llamas was unable to quantify the business benefits of the rollout, he said there will be a reduction in IT management costs as a result.

He added: "The information we get through the system has a high level of granularity. It means we can measure profitability at the SKU (stock keeping unit) level. It will allow us to make more informed business decisions in the future."

Llamas said that since the decision to migrate back-office functions to the SAP system, the retailer has been running a master data system where invalid entries on stock are down to 0.01 per cent on 1.4 million SKUs. As a result, shrinkage - lost, missing or damaged stock - has been kept at 0.7 per cent.