Perry Ellis International (PEI) is one of the largest branded lifestyle apparel companies in the world with a diverse portfolio of more than 20 brands distributed through multiple channels. PEI has more than 70 stores in the United States and United Kingdom.
Project scope and challenge
Keeping up with industry changes and customer demands is difficult with costly, obsolete software. Faced with a custom solution that was rapidly falling behind, Perry Ellis International decided to look for a solution more oriented to its needs.
PEI chose Oracle Retail Xstore and Oracle Customer Engagement (ORCE) to complement its existing Oracle solutions, broaden its understanding of customer behavior and better reward and retain customers. As a cloud solution, ORCE would help reduce PEI’s total cost of operations and give it more functionality compared with its previous customer engagement software. For example, ORCE delivers the ability to segment customers based on demographics, income levels and more, so the retailer could more effectively serve them with compelling offers.
Because PEI’s subscription with its existing CRM vendor was soon ending, it chose to implement ORCE first to get the maximum benefit and avoid a subscription renewal.
However, the timeline to meet that deadline was an eyebrow-raising seven weeks. PEI brought on BTM Global
to make it happen.
Services
This wasn’t the first partnership for Perry Ellis International and BTM Global; the retailer asked BTM to implement Oracle Retail v14. In fact, many of the BTM employees from the initial project were also part of the ORCE work, making for a faster and more efficient kick-off. PEI chose BTM based on its proven success with past projects and superior ability to collaborate with PEI’s fast-paced culture. In addition to implementation and integration, BTM Global supported end-to-end testing and training.
Leadership and a comprehensive, strategic approach were key to making this project a success. Not only was the timeline extremely tight, but there were several unique factors that added complexity:
- This was one of the industry’s first ORCE cloud implementations with data converted and migrated from a legacy CRM system in such a short period of time
- One of the industry’s first integrations of ORCE to ORPOS (PEI’s current Oracle point-of-service solution) instead
of Xstore - While the cloud environment was in production, BTM and PEI leveraged creative solutions that allowed the teams
to continue iterating and testing at the speed required to meet the deadline
“This project had a tight timeline, but we knew BTM could manage the complexity and speed because of our history of successful work together,” said Sandeep Baghel, vice president of retail systems, Perry Ellis International. “Because this project was one of the first of its kind in the industry, the BTM team’s ability to learn and adapt quickly was invaluable.”
“BTM is a trusted extension of our team and they were key to making this very unconventional project a success. We look forward to partnering with them on future work.”
Project Results
With close collaboration and trust between the teams, PEI and BTM Global rolled out ORCE to stores in the U.S. and U.K. within the seven week deadline. Key factors in that success included:
- Strong governance from the IT and the business side (this wasn’t only an IT project!)
- All stakeholders were involved from start to finish
- The scope was kept very focused, but strategic to keep in mind a future Xstore implementation
- Stakeholders had access to the system as it was developed to ensure alignment with business goals and its fit with “real world” situations
- Tight collaboration between the teams
- Zero training needed for store associated
With the new customer relationship management system, PEI can now meet customers’ high expectations of its loyalty programs, including exclusive sales and early access to new arrivals. With a faster, scalable and more flexible system, PEI delivers customer deals consistently across all of its selling channels. With data at its fingertips, the retailer gains greater intelligence for shaping future customer programs and enhancing loyalty offerings, as well as:
- Reduced maintenance for IT by eliminating integrations
- Reduced marketing costs by streamlining workflows
- Giving the marketing team the freedom to do true marketing and not spend time managing technology
- Confidence in the data
- Efficiency and superior customer service in looking up and leveraging customer data, loyalty, and appropriate pricing
- Ability to innovate faster on a cloud platform, as well as enjoy continuous delivery of updates
- Enabled omni-channel business capabilities and business processes
“We are very pleased with the outcome of this project,” said Baghel. “BTM is a trusted extension of our team and they were key to making this very unconventional project a success. We look forward to partnering with them on future work.”
