Established in 1979, Life Style Sports is a retail business focused specifically on fashion and sport. They are proud to be Ireland’s largest sports retailer, operating 53 outlets spread across the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland.
Their business had outgrown its existing IT retail solution and they required a fresh new approach to our retail solutions, one that was able to scale with our business whilst offering great flexibility against the forever changing retail demands.
After an internal analysis and selection phase, our business had chosen Dynamics 365 as our preferred solution. Early on within the project initiation phase we recognised we had limited experience in delivering and transitioning our business against a project of this size and importance with touchpoints that would affect pretty much the whole of our operations both within the back office and via our customer experiences within our stores.
With such importance surrounding the project, we enlisted XPS to assist in transitioning our existing incumbent services into D365. XPS’ experienced team were heavily involved in the overall architecture of the solution with D365 Retail Architects and Business Analysts in place to fully understand the requirements and end goals and then once agreed by the business carried forward the transformation and transition in a phased approach.
XPS architects experienced in the retail sector carried out multiple detailed architecture reviews of existing processes to fully understand the demand and scaling requirements that our solution would have to strive to manage with ease as well as have an ability to flex to the ever-changing landscape and fluid business and end-user demands. This assessment and design activity directly benefited the delivery and implementation as we better understood which areas to transition first, where issues would arise and how they could be remediated throughout the delivery.
XPS implemented a Retail Store Scale Unit which enabled LSS to adopt a Modern POS that worked when offline and Cloud POS for each of our stores (transitioned store by store). This allowed us to adopt an architecture based on the business needs and purpose, which without the direction of the XPS architects would not have been possible.
With a solution based on the Retail Store Scale Unit approach, the value propositions for us included:
Provided business continuity and reduced latency
Performing cross terminal operation scenarios without HQ connectivity
Channel DB and Retail Server that can be co-located in a single location
Browser-based Cloud POS and MPOS with offline ability
Simple flexible deployment using the self-service package, significantly reducing overall transition and implementation
Service to Service Authentication through Https between Retail Stores and HQ
The project objectives were achieved within the expected timeframe and XPS delivered a cloud-based solution that integrated point of sale, eCommerce and back-office functions.