American Golf drives expansion with store system

American Golf has upgraded and integrated its store and headquarters systems to help with its expansion plans.

The retailer specialises in golfing accessories and clothing - with prices for clubs ranging from around £60 to over £800 each. It employs 350 people in 63 stores and has an annual turnover of £65m.

The retailer has grown steadily over the last 20 years and is set for further expansion at the rate of three to five stores a year, and is also considering a move into mainland Europe, having estblished a presence in the next two years.

silicon.com Retail & Leisure

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American Golf finance director Ged Gould told to silicon.com that previously the head office ran its retail systems, mainly controlling sales and distribution data, on the Navision platform.

But the stores ran a different system and the two systems couldn't be integrated, which meant that head office and the stores were reconciling sales and stock reports manually.

Gould said: "There was no way we could progress on our expansion plans with this architecture."

Gould chose an updated version of the Navision system – now renamed Microsoft Dynamics, supplied by K3 (formerly known as Alpha Landsteinar) - because he had seen it demonstrated in other retail environments with business models similar to American Golf's.

The retailer's business model is complex in that it takes specialised orders from customers, does trade-ins and resells second-hand equipment. Gould said products from the more generic ERP vendors were too inflexible and too expensive to change to fit his business.

K3's package had already been implemented in beds retailer Dreams and video games specialist Gamestation, and Gould said: "Dreams does special customers orders for beds and Gamestation resells second-hand computer games, so we knew it could be done."

The system was rolled out to the head office and eight stores in December 2005, with the full roll-out in January - April 2006.

Gould said: "We can reconcile store receipts much more quickly now that the stores and head office are running the same systems, so there is a significant amount of time saved in terms of administration.

"It also means that there has been an improvement in stock allocation. Each store might only stock one or two sets of any particular golf club. When these can run up to £600 for each item, we could be missing significant sales if they go out of stock because of misallocation."

The system also enables American Golf to run Electronic Funds Transfer (EFT) for processing credit card payments and has Euro processing capability, ready for when the retailer moves into Europe.

In the future, Gould intends to implement electronic data interchange (EDI) with the retailer's suppliers and is looking at stacking an integrated HR and payroll package onto the system. He is also looking at moving to auto-replenishment for even greater supply chain efficiency.