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Home / Partitioning ERP into two collaborating instances for scaling

BASIC DATA

  • Partner : Promantia Global Consulting LLP
  • Product : Openbravo Commerce Suite
  • Customer : Decathlon Sports India Limited
  • Industry : Sports Goods
  • Activity : Local and International Product Sourcing, Logistics and Warehouse Management, B2B and Retail sales through stores and e-commerce
  • Number of employees : more than 2000
  • Customer website : www.decathlon.in

SUMMARY STORY

Decathlon is a leading sports retailer, with headquarters in Lille France, who have been in business for the last 40 years across 20 countries. They have been in India for the last 7 years and have more than 35 stores in India. They are the largest sports retailer in India. India is also a major manufacturing hub for Decathlon and it sources textile and sports goods for it’s global market from India.

Decathlon started with a single store in Bangalore. It initially started with Openbravo POS and then the open-source versión of the Openbravo ERP. As the scale of operation and transaction volumes increased, they moved to the profesional versión of Openbravo ERP and enlisted the principal’s ( Openbravo ) help to audit the implementation. Promantia, the gold partner of Openbravo, was engaged at this stage.

As Decathlon expanded its operations, it needed a specific solution to address its scalability requirements. It’s central operations, which covered the logistics and replenishment planning and execution, needed the ability to address more number of larger orders to be executed without increasing the processing time, while the growing number of stores required responsiveness in the application while handling increased volume of concurrent transactions.

On Decathlon’s suggestion, Promantia designed and implemented a split-system architecture with the supply end ( warehouses / back-office ) and the retail end ( stores ) being supported by two seperate Openbravo ERP instances that were connected through an online web-service interface.

The implementation enabled Decathlon achieve its expansión objective in the short term and formed the basis for the replacement of the back-end ERP with their global standard ERP ( SAP ) , while they continued to expand their stores network with Openbravo ERP as their retail ERP.

IMPLEMENTATION

The project took about 9 months from concept to go-live and consumed 40 person months of effort during that period.

The solution took advantage of Openbravo’s ease of integration capabilities and REST services were implementing the following integrations between the Supply and Retail ERP instances.

  • Master Data ( Products , Price ) set in the Supply ERP instance was pushed to the Retail ERP instance
  • Master Data ( Products , Price ) set in the Supply ERP instance was pushed to the Retail ERP instance
  • Adjustment transactions generated for any short/defective deliveries at the store end in the Retail ERP were synchronized with the warehouse on the Supply ERP instance.

Key considerations during this implementation were

  • Level of automation and integration – ensure that all calculatable values are automatically calculated and communicated across systems so that the different departments have the same and consistent view of the information across both the ERP instances.
  • Performance – Some of the functionality required optimized batch

performance, while other functionality required good online performance. Promantia achieved these objectives, by factoring functional and  nonfunctional requirements in designing the solution and involving Openbravo in design review. Further, with Openbravo’s help, an online performance monitoring tool, AppDynamics, was configured, which helped identify performance bottlenecks in the core product and the extensions developed, which were addressed, resulting in a successful implementation.

Pratik Akerkar, IT Program Manager for the project at Decathlon Sports India, said “Promantia’s deep understanding of the Openbravo product, and collaborative engagement with our team, has helped them to execute this very complex project, that would help Decathlon to continue with our business expansión plans.”.

AFTER THE PROJECT

  • Promantia integrated the revenue-side financial transactions from Openbravo ERP to the PeopleSoft system which is the global central financial system used by Decathlon.
  • Decathlon migrated the Openbravo ERP instance that was used for managing the supply-side activities with a globally standardized SAP implementation, which was integrated with the Retail Openbravo.
  • Promantia also helped migrate the retail stores to use Openbravo WebPOS, a state-of-art POS solution from Openbravo, which Decathlon is planning to make as the standard across all countries they are operating in.

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