One of the greatest joys of kids who grew up with OFW parents is going to Duty Free Philippines right after picking their parent/s up from their airport. There’s nothing better than feasting your eyes on every treat the mall offers, from the wide array of local and international chocolates, perfume and apparel to furniture and power tools.
Duty Free Philippines has been a welcome facet of OFW life for more than 30 years, helping families reward themselves for time spent working abroad, away from their loved ones.
Duty Free Nationwide
As one of leading luxury retailers in the Philippines, Duty Free Philippines wanted to provide a truly welcoming and more rewarding experience to its customers, whether they’re in Manila or in Davao. They needed to be more responsive and agile and offer a better shopping experience. They decided to embark on their digital transformation journey.
In order to do this, Duty Free Philippines has tapped Microsoft Dynamics AX to improve its financial, merchandising and front-end systems.
Duty Free Challenges
As one of the leading luxury retailers in the country, Duty Free Philippines needed to upgrade their 10-year old systems. According to Vico Angala, COO for Duty Free Philippines, the system they’ve been using has been around for more than 10 years. Angala said that it’s crucial they generate reports based on POS, inventory management and merchandise on a timely basis.
“Our previous system wasn’t helping us generate our reports within our desired time frame. It demands a lot of manual labor and encoding,” Angala said. Their IT department has to double their efforts to interface the data which causes unnecessary delays in providing the necessary business insights for managers to act on.
Charles Merioles, CIO of Duty Free Philippines echoed the same. “Essentially, we’ve been lagging behind and we found that we need to upgrade our system.”
Merioles said that DFP’s financials, merchandising and front-end applications are all different systems and their IT department had a hard time integrating all of them.
“All the systems we’re using now are showing their age, like we don’t have barcode scanning for the warehouses. We would like to automate our supply chain, store, financials. We needed progress with automation,” Merioles said.
Duty Free Luxury Items for all their branches
Duty Free Philippines looked at other ERP systems but they discovered that Microsoft Dynamics AX is a better fit as it will provide them with the end to end solution for their operations.
Dynamics AX is an integrated, adaptable business management solution that helps companies and key decision makers make business decisions with greater confidence. Microsoft Dynamics AX works like and with familiar Microsoft software, automating and streamlining business processes and connecting you with global customers, business partners, and subsidiaries in a way that helps business success.
It offers Warehouse management wherein it can automate warehouse processes to reduce operational costs. It has modern POS system tha allows customers to engage with rich clienteling, real-time inventory lookup, and back-office capabilities. On top of that, it can also provide Demand forecasting to improve forecasting accuracy to boost product availability and minimize inventory costs. Dynamics AX can also increase the consistency of your data across your organization and deployments.
With Dynamics AX, Duty Free Philippines will help them automate their supply chain, store, financials. What’s key to them is the transparency of all their supply chain data. Merioles cited that they use to go to the physical store just to check the inventory. With Dynamics AX in place, anyone can see the inventory in their desktop and mobile device immediately once it’s been delivered to their warehouse.
Another key area that’s going to improve is updating the prices on their POS. Back then, if they needed to do this, they’d have to do it by midnight. Everything needed to be processed before the store opens and they’d have to do it again move it to other internal systems. With Dynamics AX, Duty Free Philippines will be able to update their POS pricing in real time and it’ll be reflected on all their 18 operational branches. It will also be essential when they open their second biggest branch in Terminal 3 this November 2017.
Now with the new system, DFP believes that there will be less error, with auditing. Whatever information that will be computed there in the system, the information will be disseminated to the proper departments.
OFWs can reward their families with Duty Free Philippines gifts anywhere in the Philippines
While Duty Free Philippines’ digital transformation journey is still underway, their COO is glad with the advantages it’ll bring to their operations. “It’s a good supply-chain help to the operations, It’s the integration of the three systems into one, and the transparency to all your branches. Reporting is done real time. All of the processes within the company will be covered by automation, and Dynamics will be the tool to make that happen,” Angala added.
In the very near future, Duty Free Philippines prime customers, the OFWs will able to enjoy great discounts and packages of the best luxury items to give to their families whether they’re in Metro Manila, Cebu or Davao.
