Retail Pro Prism gave us omnichannel capabilities. We integrated our key software with the Prism platform to align our data and operations and minimize manufacturing delays. Having an integrated solution will help us streamline our inventory operations so we can get all our stores online, which is important since our online sales already represent 40% of total sales.

- Mr. Shehryar Buksh, CEO

HKB Retail taps into data visibility in Retail Pro Prism for efficient growth

About HKB

HKB is a family-owned business that began in 1927 in India. The business relocated to Pakistan after the end of colonial rule and the Partition, where it continued to grow their business into a multi-brand department store and opened additional stores across the decades. It was a tremendous success and serviced distinguished clientele like the Prime Minister of West Pakistan. In addition to fabric and apparel stores, HKB also expanded into the grocery segment. They now operate a total of 20+ stores across Pakistan.

Mr. Shehryar Buksh, CEO of HKB retail, joined the family business in 1995 and immediately got to work on its technology strategy.

Choosing Retail Pro over a local solution

HKB was one of the first department stores in the country to employ software as a method of managing inventory. Prior to using technology, HKB had no clear way to track and respond to trends, so customers' needs rarely aligned with what was in the store. HKB adopted a local solution but Pakistan's IT sector was in its early stages of development, so the retailer quickly outgrew this solution and started looking for a POS system that would help them to grow their business. They chose Retail Pro and proved the special retail software's flexibility in becoming its first deployment for a grocery business.

"You can't run any retail business without proper technology to support it, and I have found it is always better to choose a globally tried and tested software. Retail Pro has 30 years of specialized expertise and is far ahead of the technologies in our market. We get the advantage of leveraging their expertise and industry best practices, which allows us to focus on being retail experts, rather than technology experts," Mr. Buksh commented. "Businesses much larger than us in Pakistan are not investing as much as we are into IT. I strongly believe in the advantages of technology, and we have kept our growth above industry averages with the efficiency we gain through technology."

With Retail Pro customized to their needs, HKB soon grew their business to 12 convenience stores and 2 large grocery stores. At that point, HKB also launched its fashion business, and grew that line into 20+ fashion and womenswear stores. Each store is about 12,000 square feet, with plans to increase the floor space to 45,000 square feet. Altogether, their retail space will be an impressive 700,000 square feet in the next 4 years.

HKB is also looking to grow its international presence across the Middle East, US and UK markets via ecommerce fulfilment.

Building a comprehensive solution on the Retail Pro Prism platform

As HKB's garment business evolved from grocery stores to include their garment and fashion business, they needed end-to-end visibility across both their retail operations and other parts of their business, like vendor manufacturing and their online stores. Using the Retail Pro application has empowered the brand to integrate all needed solutions into the ecosystem to make the business more successful.

"Retail Pro Prism gave us omnichannel capabilities. We integrated our key software with the Prism platform to align our data and operations and minimize manufacturing delays. Having an integrated solution will help us standardize our inventory barcodes so we can get all our stores online, which is important since our online sales already represent 40% of total sales."

Solutions HKB integrated to Retail Pro Prism include:

• caniasERP
• Shopify
• OmniConnect
• Intelicon Contact Center Solution

Leveraging the power of Retail Pro Prism and OmniConnect, HKB now uses their warehouses as fulfilment centers, rather than keeping separate inventories for online sales and in-store sales. In addition, using direct shipments from vendors allows them to keep a leaner inventory cycle.

"Inventory accuracy at the store level begins with the vendor. In Pakistan, business technology adoption and standardization are not yet widespread. Barcodes for many products are still being applied manually, for example. We're selling about 7.5 million garments per year so reducing the margin of error for our goal of 99% accuracy is very difficult to achieve. But inefficiency and errors in a business of a larger scale cost the business more. That's why we're aiming to integrate for an end-to-end solution and creating checks and balances in the system to catch and correct human error early in the process. We are also evaluating the use of RFID for inventory accuracy across the whole channel," explained Mr. Buksh.

"Computing Solutions Pakistan is the best team I've ever worked with for all of this. CEO Arsalan Anwar's understanding of technology and his ability to come up with solutions is phenomenal and is instrumental to the execution of our vision."

Data analytics: Key for an omnichannel retailer

"The foundation of any good retail environment is a good reporting system. Right now, our cost of funds is high. The leaner we make the inventory, the more profitable we will become as an organization," Mr. Buksh explained.

"Every inventory item has to be allocated very efficiently. That's where data support comes in. Data is critical for us. Any product not sold will go into a markdown, because the opportunity cost of capital is too high. Having data about what products are selling best at what stores is of critical importance to us, so we rely on Retail Pro Decisions for accurate reporting. We have started evaluating sales trends with our design team on a weekly basis so resources can be better allocated. We look at these trends regionally, by store, by size, and allocate inventory based on customer demand.

"During COVID, most businesses suspended their operations. We used CSP's Omni Connect solution, integrated with Retail Pro Prism, to pivot our inventory from store sales to online sales during the hours of the day which were closed for physical retail, and back to store sales again, allowing us to capitalize on sales potential when our stores were closed. We also integrated with last mile courier companies to automatically choose the cheapest courier delivery with the best delivery timeframe for a specific city. This allowed us also to track whether the couriers were delivering on their committed time frames, which impacts customer experience.

"With these omnichannel tools in place, the COVID season gave us our highest growth number and showed the great potential we had in e-commerce. This strong performance allowed us to retain all our employees in a season that was filled with economic uncertainty across the whole world."

By deploying Retail Pro Prism software and taking full advantage of the platform's extensibility via seamless integrations, HKB has been able to achieve better cash flows and improved not only their profitability but their customer satisfaction as well.

Data impact on customer engagement

To satisfy their customers, the team started to focus on maintaining weekly reviews to decide what was relevant and trending in the market currently and how they could supply more of it. Through data analysis, they were able to cater to customer requirements by realigning the inventory and production process, providing more customer satisfaction.

"In Pakistan, the major cities are hubs and have their own sales trends. Using Retail Pro Decisions, we saw that Karachi sells more clothes in pastel colors, lighter fabrications, in smaller sizes, and is generally more fashion-forward. So we have realigned our allocation and production processes to cater to that. Lahore sells brighter colors. Beyond Lahore, in Islamabad, we sell bigger sizes, and in both Lahore and Islamabad, we sell flashier designs," said Mr. Buksh.

"The same thing is applicable in e-commerce also. We have seen that we sell more fabric online as compared to the retail stores, because the customer doesn't have a sizing issue when buying fabric online. We have realigned our inventory, buying, and production based on these trends."

"One of the critical factors for retail is to get foot traffic to your stores. One of the ways we are doing so is by reducing the amount of inventory we initially introduce to the stores, so we can have new inventory to drop each week. This keeps our shoppers coming back to the stores and increases conversions. We have a structure that's lean enough to respond to customer requirements and that allows us to focus on product innovations. We want to be able to increase our manufacturing flexibility and decrease the time to market for new products in response to changing customer needs."

Growth opportunities powered by technology

"In the next 3 to 5 years, we plan to expand our footprint to about 45 stores with 700,000 square feet of retail space in Pakistan. From there, we will focus on international expansion via ecommerce and potentially additional retail stores outside of Pakistan to tap into the Indian, Pakistani and Bangladeshi diaspora communities with ethnic wear or a fusion of ethnic and western fashions," said Mr. Buksh.

"We also want to expand in our categories and brands. In Pakistan, the trend is for garment manufacturers to expand into retail. In our case, we were retailers who expanded into fashion manufacturing, so our growth trajectory includes manufacturing diversification."

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