Company Profile

This company is one of Eastern Canada's largest retailers of books, CD-ROMs, videos, DVDs, magazines, newspapers, musical instruments and sheet music, overseeing a chain of 13 retail locations, primarily in the urban centers of Quebec. This retailer caters to the needs of musicians and consumers of specialty music. While the retail stores are distributed over a fairly narrow geography, products are sourced from a wide range of suppliers located in many different countries.

Business Problem

With such a wide range of product lines supplying a relatively small number of locations, and international as well as local suppliers, complete visibility into the supply chain processes quickly becomes a necessity in order to maintain and increase market share. In addition to a worldwide supplier network, the company operates in a culturally unique segment of the North American marketplace. This level of specialization presents the company with unique challenges in delivering its product at price points that are competitive with much larger organizations. One of the ways to achieve competitive equality with larger companies involves the use of business to business electronic commerce tools.

Scope of the Problem (Additional Complexity)

In addition to competing with larger companies, there were several layers of complexity that made this a challenging implementation. These are summarized as follows:

• This retailer had a very lean information technology (IT) organization that was stretched to the limit providing support to the enterprise and point of sale systems as well as the typical hardware and software licensing issues faced by all IT teams. As a result there was very little staff bandwidth available to support even the typical outsourced operation. There were no available resources to dedicate to the design, development and implementation of an in-house E-commerce environment.
• Since the suppliers were widely dispersed and IT resources limited, there were no personnel available to assist in the roll-out of a complete solution to the suppliers.
• Another difficulty with the roll-out of new technologies involves convincing prospective users to adopt the new service. In the case of bringing suppliers "into the fold", any new technologies had to be easy and inexpensive to implement. However, this retailer did not have the resources or experience to "sell" its suppliers on the merits of E-commerce.

Any new technology implementation team had to deal with a group of suppliers who communicated in French.

The Solution

After an extensive review of alternative approaches, the retailer concluded that a traditional approach to electronic data interchange (EDI)/E-commerce was too expensive, risky and time consuming for a small IT team. The company selected QLogitek and the L-eBIZ team to implement a hosted EDI/E-commerce solution.

QLogitek proposed a combination of outsourced and hosted technologies and a set of L'eBIZ managed services in order to allow complete supply chain visibility. Another key component of the solution involved the provision of the tools and capability to support the optimization of business processes in an incredibly precise and rigorous manner. QLogitek clearly demonstrated the ability to support the unique requirements of this retailer:

• Operating in several languages;
• Active participation in convincing suppliers of the benefits of participating in the project; and
• Providing services wherever necessary to ensure that the project was completed.

After an initial consultation to identify and document the key requirements, a detailed project plan was developed and approved by the client. QLogitek personnel then reviewed the requirements against their extensive component library to design a customized environment that would address the needs of both the worldwide suppliers and the local needs of the retail chain. The project team developed and implemented a private trading exchange between the retailer and its suppliers. The solution included a customized, bilingual Supplier Portal that allowed small trading partners to participate in EDI/E-commerce activities with the retailer. The combination of "middleware" and the portal technology, bundled with the right services helped drive the adoption rate by suppliers to over 90% of transaction volume. This represents significant savings for the retailer, derived from increased efficiencies.

QLogitek's team came to the table with a full solution that included not only hosted technology but the much needed solution roll-out and multi-lingual supplier support services.

The Result

For a small retailer in a unique cultural context, this solution enables the client to be competitive with much larger retailers who have multi-million dollar investments in infrastructure, software and technology personnel.

The capabilities of the L'eBIZ organization were of significant benefit to a smooth transition into the world of EDI/E-commerce. Other companies offer similar services at a substantial cost premium, with costly options to their standard platforms. The L'eBIZ solution is a cost effective, well-supported and easy-to-implement option that allows small organizations to compete with the business to business E-commerce capability of much larger companies.