Ceca-Gadis

The Ceca-Gadis group has a social and civic mission, with the goal to bring modern and quality products to the most remote corners of the country.  

Business case 

For 15 years, the Ceca-Gadis group managed their brands using various local software solutions, including Actimag and Activ for shop management, and Thalia for back-office warehouse management. As the company acquired more brands, these systems became obsolete and couldn’t support the group's growing needs. 

“Our information system was scattered among several IT solutions with different service providers. This resulted in a loss of time and high costs due to the lack of synchronization between various parties” says Charly Debydeal, Director of Innovation and Information Systems at Ceca-Gadis. In the meantime, the group had grown to more than 100 shops representing over 10 food and non-food brands. With the diversification of the group's brands and the high volume of transactions, it became impossible to control activities, and too complicated for management to find information or data.  

To solve these issues, they agreed they urgently needed to replace their retail system with a unified commerce system, a single platform to cover the entire business. 

The solution 

The company started looking for an ERP and a POS system which would allow them to manage in real time their entire retail operations, from the head office down to the stores, for all their brands. Ceca-Gadis concluded that LS Central, which extends Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central ERP, would best suit their needs. The standard functionality in LS Central enables retailers to cover the POS, stores, head-office, warehouse and accounting functions. “LS Central provided a direct and personalized response to our needs, always within the framework of an integrated and homogenous environment,” says Debydeal. LS Central is user-friendly and easy to deploy, so Ceca-Gadis was confident that it could also be implemented in other subsidiaries, if the need arose.  

The company selected Deltasoft, an LS Retail partner known for its quality of service and tested expertise of LS Retail solutions, to help them achieve their objectives.   

Mutual trust is essential for any partnership. It becomes even more crucial in a project to roll out 130 shops over three years. Despite a few challenges due to the Covid-19 crisis and restrictions, the commitment and professionalism of Deltasoft have kept the process on track. 

The company went live with a beauty store. An Yves Rocher shop was the first running on LS Central, quickly followed by a convenience store brand, the first Cecado pilot shop. “The success of these two projects would not have been possible without a partner like Deltasoft by our side, which with its retail expertise deployed all the means necessary for a successful implementation of LS Central” says Debydeal.

Benefits 

As the first sites went live, the group already experienced positive effects. LS Central covers all the flows at the shop level, from supply to stock to finance. Ceca-Gadis can now: 

• Run automatic order proposals with the replenishment module. 
• Keep track of receipts and inventories of items across all locations. 
• Minimize manual operations. Labelling with barcodes has simplified stock management. 
• Improve customer service. Sales staff can now spend more time with customers and ensure that in-demand products are available. 
• Track different KPIs and dashboards quickly with LS Insight. 
• Make decisions that enhance the business. Managers at HQ have real-time visibility of the activity and figures of each shop. 

Although the implementation is still ongoing, Ceca-Gadis is confident that LS Retail's technology will support the growth of their business in the future. They plan to set up a central purchasing unit, a group loyalty card, and ways to reduce dormant stock. They also plan to integrate LS Recommend to offer their customers targeted and personalized products based on their purchasing behavior and socio-demographic characteristics. 

Ceca-Gadis will also work with Deltasoft and LS Retail on digitalizing the whole group's activity and adding the features they need to deliver great service in all their stores, online and offline. "With Covid-19, we have to educate our customers about online shopping and provide them with the best online shopping experience to enable them to always shop without taking health risks" concludes Debydeal.