Musical retailer improves stock visibility

Pro audio music retailer Digital Village implemented a retail software management system to improve productivity and sales in 2003.

Prior to that, the company was using Claris Filemaker, a simple database to manage stock. This system had to be polled every night and was little use to sales staff in the stores that wanted to check availability and condition of stock in other stores.

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The company not only has eight stores, a viable website operation and an installation division, it is also the UK's largest educational supplier for musical equipment, a business mainly supported by its 36,000 square-foot warehouse in Romford.

Digital Village MD Paul Dennis explained to silicon.com that the company originally decided to invest in a solution from Great Plains Software to capitalise on the opportunities presented by live updating stock data as early as 1991, but because of development problems on the supplier side this implementation never quite came off.

In the end Dennis had to look for another supplier and K3 was able to deliver.

The K3 system, based on Microsoft's Navision application allows Digital Village staff to view live stock and general ledger information. It is also integrated with the company's delivery systems and its website, so that orders can be made online by customers out of store hours and only needs to be approved the next morning for items to be sent out.

The efficiency on orders has increased productivity by 30 per cent and orders themselves have increased by at least 100 per cent since the system was implemented.

In mid 2007, the company upgraded its database systems from the native Navision offering to SQL, which has improved stock system performance in terms of concurrent users.

Dennis said: "Overall, the system has enabled us to become more efficient. Web customers get their goods as quickly as possible and they are also being driven into the stores at the same time. The system also makes it easier to add another location to the portfolio if we want to expand."