Dis-Chem’s IT & Projects executive, Kim Sim, highlighted the contribution of SAP and UCS Solutions to the company’s successful and continued growth at the SAP Australian User Group annual summit. The conference was held in Sydney in September.

“Our company was experiencing tremendous growth, with a massive impact on business processes, people, systems and data centre facilities,” says Sim. “We were literally bursting out of our legacy systems. What we needed was an integrated solution that would give us more flexibility and visibility while supporting retail best practice.” Dis-Chem identified SAP All-in-One as the software of choice, but realised it needed a strategic partner that combined SAP expertise and experience with a deep understanding of the retail sector. UCS Solutions was able to provide both. In particular, it is the only SAP retail partner in the country with its own retail template.

“SAP’s retail best practices are built into the software, providing an approximately 50 % fit to the local retail environment. Our retail template, ReadytoRetail, takes the fit to 80 %, thus dramatically reducing the customisation needed,” says Reg Barry, client delivery executive: Application Services at UCS Solutions. “This in turn reduced the project implementation time frame and lowered costs.” UCS Solutions initially implemented SAP All in One across finance, merchandising, warehouse management and business warehouse, in nine months. The solution went live in 2009. The centralised SAP model allowed Dis-Chem to integrate its existing point-of-sale system to the SAP solution in-store and at head-office. At the time of go-live, Dis-Chem consisted of 37 stores with 4 500 employees. A year of stabilisation followed, which was used wisely to bed the system down, and crucially, further train employees.

The acceptance of the system was in part responsible for the tremendous growth in the number of SAP users within the company over the years. By 2013, the company’s tally of stores had reached 75 and its staff complement had doubled to over 8 000. While recognising the importance of its IT systems to underpin its growth, Dis-Chem nevertheless did not want to have to develop a full internal IT capability. Accordingly, they rely on UCS Solutions, as a strategic partner, to provide a total outsourced solution, including leveraged cloud infrastructure, network support, and RunSAP Support Services. “This is a story about a successful business that uses its investment in SAP, and its partnership with UCS Solutions, to support that growth,” says Sim. “As our CEO says, SAP was never just a software investment but a strategic investment for the group.”