Pet Supplies Plus stocks its 317 stores with nine thousand SKUs from 200 suppliers. It’s deployed a variety of web-based technology so that it can get the right products into the right stores and set the stage for building more stores and launching its first retail e-commerce site.

Getting this right is crucial given that consumers have so many ways to buy pet supplies, whether in store son online, says senior vice president of merchandising Derek Panfil. “My task is to figure out how to march forward and move at the speed the consumer is moving,” Panfil said during a presentation last week at SPSInfluence, the annual conference for companies that use supply chain management and business integration software from SPS Commerce Inc. With competition from other online and multichannel retailers, he added, “We may not exist in five years if we don’t figure this thing out.”

Pet Supplies Plus, which does about $700 million a year in total sales, is owned by private equity firm Irving Place Capital.

To stay in the game and increase its competitiveness, Pet Supplies Plus is following a multistep process designed to ensure it can manage the right volume and mix of products for both its online and store channels. The company started in 2013 with a new Internet-based warehouse management system from Manhattan Associates Inc., followed by adding a product information management system and the deployment of a new Microsoft Dynamics enterprise resource planning system from Microsoft Corp.

Next it was ready to start deploying earlier this year an Internet- or cloud-based electronic data interchange system, or EDI,  from SPS Commerce that lets it automate its ordering from suppliers. Compared with a traditional EDI system, which runs on a private network, cloud-based EDI is accessible via a web browser. That frees a company from having to run an EDI network on its own infrastructure, and it makes it easier to on-board new trading partners, SPI says.

The retailer is using the SPS technology—which includes a web-based interface where the retailer and its suppliers can view the same data on sales and inventory levels—to better collaborate with suppliers to share information on which SKUs sell best. “We have to get better in planning assortments by store,” Panfil said. “We have to deliver choice.”

The traditional way for Pet Supplies Plus to share information with suppliers has been for a manager at the retailer to pull information on sales and inventory, send it in a spreadsheet to a supplier, then discuss with the supplier future orders. But suppliers often rely on its own data, and that can result in disagreements over how sales are trending, Panfil said. The web-connected EDI system is starting to change that as it provides suppliers and Pet Supplies Plus a common view of the data.

“We’re literally looking at the same data, and don’t spend a half hour getting into a discussion about what’s in that data,  what’s driving performance, what’s not driving performance,” he said.

The biggest step forward beyond deploying its warehouse management and ERP systems, he added, “is just getting the data to flow back and forth” between Pet Supplies Plus and its suppliers.

In addition, with the ability of the web-based EDI system to more accurately and quickly share purchase orders and related documents, the retailer can more quickly get products into its stores. In one case, for example, Pet Supplies Plus was able to introduce new products from a supplier within two weeks instead of what might have been a month or more in the past, Panfil said.

Pet Supplies Plus is preparing for its next major moves in its growth strategy by exploring a new web-enabled point-of-sale system for its stores and new e-commerce technology for launching its first retail e-commerce site—a move timed to follow its implementation of the new systems for managing inventory and financial records. With all of these systems in place—and, in turn, using analytics software to compile and analyze more information on sales across its stores and website—the retailer expects to have more information to help it better plan product assortments across its expanded number of stores as well as online. With only 1,500 dog food SKUs now in its stores, it will strive to sell more top-selling items from the 5,000 dog food SKUs available from its suppliers.

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