Sally Beauty
Laying a Foundation for Flawless Commerce
What if… we could digitize the supply chain of an international beauty product retailer and distributor to create true omnichannel commerce?
About the Client
Sally Beauty Holdings, Inc., is an international retailer and distributor of professional beauty supplies. Headquartered in Denton, Texas, the company achieves annual revenues of more than $3.9 billion selling and distributing products through more than 4,000 stores in North and South America and Europe, online through SallyBeauty.com, and to B2B customers through its CosmoProf brand.
A Customer Experience in Need of a Makeover
Organizations and individuals alike expect efficiency in the ordering process, but Sally Beauty was struggling to keep up with customer demands when it came to features like split shipments and fulfilling from multiple locations. As a result, the company was losing sales. Sally Beauty needed to reimagine its order management model to meet marketplace demands and keep pace with competitors.
An OMS That Turns Heads
Without a robust order management system, Sally was unable to split shipments and automate aspects of the fulfillment process. As a result, 20% of its online orders were cancelled due to the inability to source and fulfill orders from various locations.
We conducted several workshops and whiteboard sessions with Sally’s stakeholders to outline the company’s key goals and business requirements.
Armed with this information, we got to work implementing the IBM Sterling OMS platform, taking care to integrate seamlessly with Sally’s other technologies as well as its website. Then we moved on to do the same for Sally’s other brand, CosmoProf.
The new OMS capabilities provide improved visibility and flexibility in ordering, fulfillment, and customer service processes, especially for call center employees, and elevates the overall purchasing experience for both B2B and B2C Sally Beauty customers.
A Picture-Perfect Digital Roadmap
Sally Beauty was limited in its fulfillment capabilities, so customers could not shop wherever and however they wanted. To fix this, we built a digital roadmap and strategy to move forward in the quest for true omnichannel commerce.
The new OM system allows Sally Beauty to deliver capabilities such as buy online, pick up in store and same-day delivery. Elevated order fulfillment capabilities and improved inventory visibility also resulted in new sales channel opportunities with third-party marketplaces like Amazon and eBay, helping Sally meet its customers wherever they shop.
Adding the Finishing Touches in Record Time to Prosper During a Pandemic
As retail businesses across the nation struggled amid the COVID-19 pandemic, our client had an immediate need to stand up a new ship-from-store fulfillment option that would allow customers to receive their orders quickly.
Typically, this type of elaboration would take three to four months to implement, so when the Sally team asked if we could deliver this functionality in just ten days, it seemed impossible.
However, our commitment to the client and our expertise in order management made us the perfect partner in the face of this crisis. The ship-from-store functionality was built and deployed in ten days, as promised, and launched without a hitch.
The pandemic quickly shifted our focus to online commerce and alternative fulfillment processes. We knew it would be a tough process, but it hasn’t been difficult. We deployed the technology cloud-first, using the plumbing we already had in place. As a result of the structure of our team and a rock-solid implementation from Perficient, we’ve been able to deploy very quickly.Chief Technology Officer, Sally Beauty Holdings
The Beauty of Same-Day Delivery
To extend an exceptional fulfillment experience to Cosmo Prof, the B2B side of the business, we worked with our client to enable same-day delivery (SDD) for orders placed online. After seeing a successful customer adoption of this feature, it was rolled out to all of Sally’s retail customers.
Leveraging the capabilities of IBM Sterling OMS, we helped our customer accelerate its same-day delivery services to just three hours for all 1,990 stores across the U.S. The program ships merchandise directly from physical stores, improves speed-to-fulfillment for customer orders, and exceeds customer expectations by delivering products quickly.
Additionally, on-demand carrier services such as Uber and Postmates deliver the orders, which meant Sally wasn’t required to invest in and create its own fleet of delivery services.
Results
A Striking Digital Transformation
The IBM Sterling OMS implementation improved our client’s order fulfillment processes, reduced the number of order cancellations, increased fill rates and improved the overall customer experience.
As a result, our client experienced:
- 600% order volume growth in certain product categories
- 100% ROI on its OMS investment in just a few months
