No more upgrades.
That was the main appeal for top home furnishing retailer Lamps Plus Inc. to upgrade its order management system with Manhattan Associates Inc. to the Active Omni platform, Bill Gratke, senior vice president of supply chain, planning and reporting told Digital Commerce 360 at the Manhattan Momentum 2023 conference in Phoenix last week.
Instead of going through a major upgrade for any change it wants to make to its order platform, such as adding a new payment feature, the Active Omni platform is “version-less,” Gratke said. Manhattan Associates will continually update the software every 90 days with new features. If Lamps Plus wants a specific feature, it will have to wait until Manhattan adds it in one of its releases. It may not need every feature that the vendor will continually add, but it will be available to the retailer. A refresh of features every 90 days is a huge benefit compared with waiting for the company to do an upgrade, which could be seven years later, said Clark Linstone, president and chief operating officer.
Lamps Plus upgrades with Manhattan Associates
Lamps Plus has a good track record with Manhattan Associates, as it uses Manhattan’s older Distributed Order Management system, which it implemented in 2012. In addition, Lamps upgraded its point-of-sale system to Manhattan’s Active POS in 2018.
“Our success with Active POS has paved the way for us to move on to Active Omni,” Gratke said. “We have a high degree of confidence. The people who helped implement, they’re smart, and they delivered the product they said they would. And I can tell you, that’s the reason why we’re moving on to Active Omni.”
The cloud-based system also means Lamps Plus will have less physical hardware at its location.
“(The benefit) is it’s getting out of the hardware business, and basically having the ability to get more sleep at night because the system is not going down or you don’t have to reboot a server weekly or something like that. And those are all the things that happen with a hardware-based system in your own data center,” Gratke said.
The brand expects the store-side of the upgrade to go live in August 2023, and the online customer-service integration will go live in summer 2024. Lamps Plus decided to stagger the release dates in order to lower the amount of risk on such a critical system, Gratke said.
The implementation fee for the integration is more than $1 million and the annual subscription fee also is more than $1 million, Lamps Plus said.
Order management complexity
Order management, however, is a huge animal to tackle. Consider this: Lamps Plus takes orders from its website, LampsPlus.com, from its 36 showrooms and a handful of marketplaces, including those operated by Amazon.com Inc., Target Corp., Walmart Inc., eBay Inc. and Google Inc.
Lamps Plus supplies its products from 700 vendors, which Lamps Plus views as 700 additional warehouses with its products. It takes inventory feeds from all of them at least once a day to ensure its inventory counts are accurate. Lamps Plus has two distribution centers, its main one in California, which sprawls 784,000 square feet, a distribution center in Pennsylvania and a returns center in California. Lamps Plus ships about 70% of its products from its own distribution center and drop ships the other 30% from one of its vendors’ warehouse.
“The hardest install we’ll ever have is order management, because it’s the brains of entire order system,” Gratke said. “Every order in your entire company from POS to kiosk orders to marketplace orders to your own proprietary website — Lampsplus.com — all come through that same system and goes to the brains. And the brains, which is the order management system, decides where to place order: vendor, your own warehouse store or whatever it might be.”
More sophisticated rules
With the new order management system, Lamps Plus can implement more sophisticated rules about where to ship items from based on freight costs, shipping costs, speed, proximity to shopper among others. For example, the new system will allow the retailer to allocate sensitivities and thresholds with each of its priorities. As an example, if an order is $3 cheaper to ship from a vendor, but the customer would have to wait 10 more days, the new system may opt for a more expensive shipping source in order to have faster shipping, based on the rules the retailer set.
“It’s both speed and costs, and cost has gotten to be the bigger issues as oil price increase significantly,” Linstone said. “So the timeliness of how quickly we can get the product to the customer and how cost effective are the drivers behind this and trying to figure out the absolute best place to ship from.”
While the older system worked, it was “clunky” and tweaking the rules in the new system will be much easier, he said.
Lamps Plus is No. 109 in the 2023 Digital Commerce 360 Top 1000.
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