building materials and garden equipment

Build stronger relationships with your customers

Boost customer satisfaction and loyalty by making the product selection and buying process simpler and more personalized for your retail and pro customers with the Openbravo Commerce Suite. Our multichannel solution allows you to manage assortments complexities and transform the traditional physical store to tap new areas of growth and optimize promotions, channel integration and real-time inventory visibility across locations.

Openbravo Commerce Suite offers you the flexibility to roll-out a new store solution that enables your physical stores to focus on service and shopping experience, or an all-in-one Retail ERP for managing your entire business from the front checkout counter to the back office.

Building Materials and Garden Equipment

Retail


Building Material and Garden Equipment retailers operate in a very challenging environment, which is highly competitive and demanding. Demand is driven mainly by residential real estate construction and renovation. Sold products include lumber and other structural building materials and supplies and hardware, tools, and plumbing and electrical supplies, paint and wallpaper, and lawn and garden products. In addition to selling products, many companies sell different services such as installation, repair or maintenance using employees or contractors.

The industry is dominated by do-it-yourself (DIY) retailers, also referred to as Home Centers, primarily engaged in retailing a general line of home repair and improvement materials and supplies, marketing their goods both to DIYers and contractors and selling everything necessary to construct most homes and commercial buildings. Other types of retailers such as Paint and Wallpaper Stores, Hardware Stores or Garden Centers complement the industry offer. Pro customers become one of the key target markets for these retailers that try to offer the most convenient products and services adapted to their special needs.

The volatility of construction activity is clearly the main challenge. The resulting swings in sales volumes for building materials make business planning a major challenge. However, remodeling expenditures remains strong as homeowners have become concerned about falling house prices. To minimize the effects of the housing slump, retailers try different initiatives such as expanding into non-building-product lines.

To succeed today, companies must master all aspects of their operations while remaining ever alert to nuances of customer needs and demands. Those retailers that harness information and exploit it to the fullest have a distinct advantage over their competitors.

Building Materials and Garden Equipment retailers are also investing more in eCommerce and omnichannel initiatives. We see today how much more retailers are displaying only a limited product assortment in stores. Having more on tap online is also a way for them to ship to customers directly from manufacturers, bypassing several layers in the distribution process. This endless aisle feature enables the most efficient fulfillment option to deliver the order to the customer, be it from a store, via a distribution center, or directly through one of the suppliers, which also optimizes the investment of inventory in stores. Brands that have established omnichannel capabilities and have begun to transform their stores to showcase the brand and product and offer a higher level of service are set to benefit.

Industry Background

Retail

Improve logistics and inventory management and visibilityTo leverage eCommerce and satisfy the growing demands of omnichannel customers, retailers must gain inventory visibility across channels, with an increased assortment available to customers online. The need to offer a broader range of fulfilment options, as well as ready availability of the stock in demand, results in changes to their supply chain logistics. Ultimately, end-to-end supply chain visibility is key to optimizing supply chain operations, where transportation becomes one of the most critical activities.

Manage assortment complexitiesWhen it comes to assortment, Building Materials and Garden Equipment retailers face a world of complexity, especially great in the case of multi-line retailers, driven by vast product diversity for diverse building usage, from home builders products, plumbing products, tools, protective clothing, lighting or garden products, amongst others, and the number of attributes that define a product in many of the categories.

Increase promotions efficiencyAs a result of the previously mentioned assortment complexity, Building Materials and Garden Equipment retailers also face great pricing complexity. And due to increasing competition, it is

important to reach customers as early as possible, which requires to lower time-to-market when introducing price changes and new promotions.

Integrate physical and digital channels effectivelyBrands and retailers that wish to distinguish their customer experience should take into consideration the omnichannel approach. Companies can no longer focus on a single channel: they have to define a consistent strategy for all retail channels and deliver a seamless shopping experience across all of them.

Simpler highly personalized shopping experienceA highly developed level of service and specialization is key for Building Materials and Garden Equipment retailers, especially when dealing with pro customers. To do that retailers must empower store associates to deliver excellent customer service.

Transform the traditional physical store to tap new areas of growthBrands must enable their stores as true experience destinations and to become new fulfilment centers to support cross-channel scenarios.

Key Challenges for Building Materials and Garden Equipment Retailers


Retail

Openbravo Unique Differentiators

Greater POS MobilityEnjoy 100% POS functionality on mobile terminals.

Greater Hardware SavingsGain the ability to use your existing POS hardware.

Greater FlexibilityAdapt easier for faster innovation and differentiation either On-premise or in the Cloud.

Faster New Store OpeningsGo live with your new store in less than one business day.

Faster New Associates TrainingTrain your new store associates in minutes.

Faster Pricing and Promotion UpdatesUpdate prices and promotions to all your stores in minutes.


Retail

Key Benefits for Building Materials and Garden Equipment RetailersOpenbravo delivers a modern multichannel retail business solution that helps Building Materials and Garden Equipment retailers to address today’s challenges while providing full confidence to support their fast changing future needs.


Retail

Centralized real-time inventory visibilityOpenbravo provides Building Materials and Garden Equipment retailers with a comprehensive set of features specially designed to gain accurate control and visibility of inventory across locations, for retailers that want to ensure proper executional performance and deliver enhanced customer service regardless of the channel.

■ Centralized real-time tracking of goods movements, inventory status and quantities across all channels and locations, either physical stores, headquarters or distribution centers.

■ Set up of different warehouse rules and easy management of goods transfers, picking and packing activities and reservations.

■ Available mobile warehouse functionality for inventory count, goods movements and picking lists for a more convenient and accurate capture of data.

Agile assortments, products and promotions managementOpenbravo makes it easy for Building Materials and Garden Equipment retailers to manage the complexity of a vast variety of products that can be easily created, managed and rapidly made available to all channels.

■ Support the variety of your assortments, from home builders products, plumbing products, tools, protective clothing, lightning or garden products amongst others, in just one system, with an unlimited number of product categories that can be organized and browsed in a hierarchical mode.

■ Manage single products, BOM, kits or variants based on an unlimited number of product characteristics like color, size, weight or others, and assign them easily to your different price lists and assortments. Use additional product fields to track manufacturer, specs and other specific item information.

■ Create Packs combining different products and/or services that can be sold at a fixed price.■ Define an unlimited number of prices and highly targeted promotions with discount application rules

based on the combination of multiple criteria such as stores, customers or customer categories, products or product categories, and leverage a long list of supported discount types like Buy N Get M, Buy as a Gift, Discount by line or by Total Amount amongst others.

■ Lower time-to-market by making your product, pricing and promotion changes available in all your stores and terminals in minutes.


Retail

Superb in-store shopping experienceOpenbravo helps Building Materials and Garden Equipment retailers to empower their store associates to deliver a great in-store shopping experience that results in higher customer loyalty.

■ Create and identify your customers at the POS, apply special pricing and automatic membership discounts to them and assist them everywhere in the store, either on the store floor or behind the counter.

■ Increase customer satisfaction, as well as up-selling and cross-selling possibilities by informing customers about applicable promotions, complementary products or services as well as available units in other locations when you are running out of stock in your store.

■ Create layaways to sell items you don’t have, record deposits and release completed layaways.■ Create departmental orders that can be recalled in other departments for adding more items

and at the checkout counter for paying■ Provide payment convenience with a variety of methods such as cash, credit card, gift cards

and gift vouchers, store coupons, credit sales or multicurrency payments.■ Reward your customers with integrated loyalty programs. ■ Provide a highly specialized service to your pro customers with capacity of filtering and searching

by multiple technical characteristics of your products.■ Manage sales quotes and convert them easily to orders creating a seamless customer experience

each time they visit your store.■ Manage different services such as store appointments, fulfillment services such as installation,

transportation or truck rental or after-sale services like repairs and guarantees.■ Offer different delivery options at ticket or line level, such as cash&carry, home delivery or

warehouse pick-up.


Retail

Simplified multi-store managementOpenbravo makes it easy for Building Materials and Garden Equipment retailers with multiple locations to keep their stores network running smoothly and cohesively, no matter if they run a few or hundreds of stores.

■ Model your entire network with the creation of store groups and individual stores that can be created in minutes by using another as a template, and adjust store settings for local or international locations including currency, language, number and time formats, ticket templates, price list or assortment.

■ Manage all your master data from a single repository, including products, prices, promotions or taxes that can be updated in all your stores and terminals in minutes, and without the traditional complexity of file transfers between locations.

■ Improve operational execution and fraud control with supporting features such as opening and closing stores and terminals or managers’ approvals for selected actions or events, such as deleting a ticket or line, manage returns or registering cash count differences during an initial or a closing count.

■ Gain real-time visibility into sales and inventory across all locations and analyze them in detail with available advanced reporting capabilities.

■ Simplify store IT management and reduce store IT costs thanks to a full web and mobile enabled architecture.

Omnichannel readinessOpenbravo provides Building Materials and Garden Equipment retailers with the key building blocks that are mandatory to progress with any omnichannel strategy today. Combined with the flexibility of the platform, retailers get peace of mind they are adopting a solution that is able to support today’s needs as well as the fast-changing omnichannel customer expectations of the future.

■ Ensure product data quality and consistency across all assisted and non-assisted sales channels with centralized management of all your products, prices and promotions.

■ Provide accurate inventory information regardless of the channel and gain single view of customer activity across channels.

■ Integrate seamlessly with the eCommerce platform of your choice or leverage existing connectors with solutions like Magento or Prestashop in combination with available process automation and orchestration features to support distributed order management.

■ Prepare your stores towards becoming real multichannel hubs and benefit from new opportunities like store fulfilment.


Retail

Future-proof retail business management solutionOpenbravo provides Building Materials and Garden Equipment retailers with a flexible solution which is able to prepare them for the future whatever changes are required.

■ Built-in multi-currency, multi-tax, multi-language and multi-accounting features to support your international growth.

■ Scale easily with new stores, products or users.■ Gain endless flexibility to introduce future innovations and support your most specific business

requirements.■ Scale from a store solution to an all-in-one Retail ERP for managing the entire business or subsidiaries

in your selected territories, with extensive support for the customer, supply chain, financials and accounting management.

Embedded analytics and reportingOpenbravo provides Building Materials and Garden Equipment retailers with a complete set of reporting and business intelligence tools that allow them to improve decision making and react faster to customer behavior changes.

■ Leverage available analytical reports, including store productivity, cash up or discounts analysis amongst others.

■ Allow your managers to create ad-hoc new reports for improved analysis and decision making.■ Allow your store managers to track key store indicators such as Best Selling Products or Best Selling

Product Categories amongst others that can be easily accessed from their personal workspace.■ React faster to events requiring immediate attention with a flexible alert system that informs your

users through the user interface or by email.


Retail

By adopting Openbravo, Building Materials and Garden Equipment retailers will gain access to a flexible technology platform providing the core set of technologies that allows Openbravo to be extended to fit your business needs or to develop completely new differentiating and innovative enterprise solutions.

Do more, faster and with lower risks with a truly modular architectureOpenbravo’s modularity enables retailers to become more agile and experiment with lower risks, a key capacity in today’s fast-changing retail industry where it may be necessary first to validate new innovations in a more controlled environment before going global.

■ Modularity provides the ability to adapt faster and with a higher granularity level. An extension module is a piece of additional functionality that can be deployed optionally and independently on top of the Openbravo solution.

■ Modularity enables gradual production deployment, which allows to reduce risks and increase time-to-value.

■ And since it decouples core functionality from extensions, it makes update and upgrade processes smoother.

Integrate and Connect Everything, FasterOpenbravo provides a highly interoperable platform that makes it easier to integrate with all your channels, solutions and technologies.

■ Protect prior IT investments with a solution that is very easy to integrate with your legacy systems.■ Leverage existing connectors (with Magento, Prestashop, SugarCRM and others) or build completely

new modules for robust and secure integrations.■ Lower time-to-market when integrating future new channels, solutions or technologies.

Scale securely and achieve higher business agility with Mobility and CloudOpenbravo provides a highly scalable architecture that allows retailers to grow with confidence as their business requirements evolve, while helping them to get all the benefits from mobile and cloud technologies.

■ Architecture designed for high performance on big load environments, with a distributed architecture for unlimited scaling.

■ Openbravo Cloud deployment option for maximum flexibility.■ Mobile-enabled architecture for building responsive web mobile applications that enable your

mobile-first strategy.

A Future-proof Technology Platform


Retail

About Openbravo

Openbravo is a world leader in the commercial open source software space helping midsize and large specialty retailers around the globe successfully manage continuous business change and innovation in today’s fast changing retail industry. Openbravo offers the Openbravo Commerce Suite, a multichannel retail business solution that allows specialty retailers to manage their entire business and transform their physical store channel to deliver great shopping experiences, while enabling more focus on business differentiation thanks to a highly flexible and extendible commerce technology platform, which is mobile-enabled and cloud-ready.

Openbravo has offices in France, India, Mexico and Spain and distributes its software solutions through a global network of Authorized Partners.

www.openbravo.com

building materials and garden equipment

Documents