Harrods wraps up move to ERP

New system helps department store analyse profitability

Harrods: has improved business analysis capabilities

Luxury retailer Harrods has completed the final stage of a legacy migration project.

The Knightsbridge store has moved its final two departments – food and beverages and furniture – to a unified enterprise resource planning (ERP) system from SAP, to improve efficiency and profitability.

‘Harrods has grown its business in the last four years. Previously many departments were operating in their own silos with lack of consistent reporting and poor data quality. Now we capture sales information and analyse profitability at product level for all that we buy,’ said Harrods director of IT David Llamas.

The system has reduced the number of items generating invalid or incorrect information at the till, from 3.5 per cent in areas such as fresh foods 18 months ago to 0.25 per cent.

In some departments such as food and beverage, all items were invalids four years ago, and the store had no accurate way of assessing the department’s profitability. Now Harrods can compare the performance of various departments.

‘Each department used to be its own business,’ said Llamas. ‘Now we have 1.4 million stockkeeping units of product data, all with the same structure.’