Munro Footwear Group steps ahead with Infor CloudSuite Fashion

Driving intelligent innovation with reliable data and streamlined processes. Munro is now one of Australia’s leading retailers and wholesalers of footwear, as well as a custodian of iconic brands including Midas, Mollini, Colorado, Diana Ferarri, and Django and Juliette.

With its recent rapid acquisition strategy, and resulting brand expansion and growth in market share, Munro Footwear Group identified a clear need for an intelligent approach to consolidating operations, creating consistency, and realizing efficiencies.

The challenge of moving from a group structure, linking disparate brands and divisions, to a cohesive and streamlined company structure also presented a critical opportunity to move ahead with digital transformation and enable datadriven innovation.

Without a unified and flexible information solution, Munro had no clear visibility into its supply chain, inventory, stock availability, or dispatch times. As a result, there was limited capacity to address the challenges of improving stock management, reducing time to consumer, and making operations leaner. And with more than a million SKUs (stock keeping units) in play, and 1,500 new styles coming into stores every season, supply chain visibility and supplier management is a critical business issue with huge ramifications for efficiency and profitability.

“Our digital transformation strategy is driven by our growth,” Rod Stanton, Head of Systems and Business Intelligence at Munro, explained. “After acquiring three new businesses within a short timeframe—all using different ERP systems and none of them scalable or future-proof—we went to market for a new integrated business platform and identified Infor as a provider of stand-out technology.”

Infor CloudSuite Fashion is at the center of the consolidated operations, providing a new level of efficiency, and a reliable and trusted central source of business data to drive digital innovation throughout the business—from streamlined financial reporting to supply chain synergies and efficiencies in inventory and warehouse management.

With digital enablement delivering new competitive advantages daily in the retail sector, Munro Footwear Group’s board of directors is keenly aware of the imperative to stay abreast of new technology and be ready to realise the savings it can deliver. Like many forward-looking retailers, it is leveraging the cloud in a variety of ways, including its middleware, point of sale solution, and through a partnership with Amazon Web Services (AWS).

“We’re in the business of selling shoes, not hosting servers and managing software—so it makes complete sense that we get our core business applications into the cloud with Infor,” said Stanton. “The risk involved in being reliant on on-premises technology just doesn’t add up, and having Infor CloudSuite as software-as-a-service gives us the agility we need, and means that monitoring and maintenance worries are a thing of the past.”

High-resolution transparency powers improved responsiveness .  “We are seeing quite amazing efficiency improvements in various areas of the business, as a direct result of implementing CloudSuite Fashion,” said Stanton. “Its inventory management capabilities gives us high-resolution transparency into individual store performance. CloudSuite integrates this data with the intelligence it generates from its agile warehouse management functionality—and this means we can ensure stock transfers are immediately responsive to customer needs.

“We can now place any of our stock exactly where our customers need it to be, without delay, and the time taken to get stock out of containers to receipt inventory into the system has been reduced by 12 hours.”

Munro now has the capacity to source stock from multiple brands and businesses using distribution orders, rather than the previous cumbersome system of purchase orders and customer orders which were generated by—and sat within— disparate systems.

“Moving to an ERP with integrated financial capabilities has been a massive step forward for us, making our whole process of producing financial reports significantly more accurate while at the same time much more efficient,” said Stanton. “Previously we needed to do work with financial data manually outside of the system via journals, so we were wasting a lot of time and the margin for error was a risk for audit.

“CloudSuite’s functionality is targeted to our industry, and its stability is impressive with virtually no downtime. This empowers us to concentrate on the business of selling shoes, safe in the knowledge that the system will be available and working to the performance levels we require.”

With a keen eye on future opportunities, Munro Footwear Group is pressing on with plans to get still more value from its partnership with Infor. High on the agenda is leveraging CloudSuite Fashion’s capabilities for financial and assortment planning, which will empower sales forecasting and merchandise planning.

Munro is also keen to move ahead with Infor's native cloud business intelligence and business analytics platform, Birst®, so that CloudSuite Fashion’s expansive functionality will be informed by real-time, targeted and incisive data for smarter decisions and intelligent evolution across the whole business.

“I’ve been working with Infor for 10 years and I know from experience that the sky’s the limit to this technology’s functionality,” said Stanton. “We have recently gone live on a major upgrade because we’re a rapidly changing business in one of the most dynamic industries—and we need to be on the lastest and greatest technology available. The business will always want more—better reporting, visually informative dashboards, faster tools—and we knew with CloudSuite Fashion we’d get the best value technology for our money.”