Challenges in managing operations
As the company grew, it became difficult to manage the increasingly complex operations. Annabelle was faced with having to handle a large amount of inventory without a robust system; it was especially difficult to distribute the stocks, keeping track of what was available at the warehouse versus the various store locations. Besides the rudimentary inventory management software, Annabelle had no system to manage their business critical operations, including financials, sales, and marketing. The legacy POS (Point of Sale) software would also need to be improved or replaced. These technical needs started to become problematic, as they were limiting the company’s ability to grow. Of all the solutions that we evaluated, LS Nav proved to excel in all the areas that were looking for,” says Rajan Gill, Annabelle’s Managing Director. “With LS Nav managing our retail operation, we will be able to define new processes, reduce our costs and focus on growing the business effectively.”

Easy implementation, rapid benefits
LS Retail’s partner AP&T Business Solutions, located in the UAE, supported Annabelle all the way. They carried out various stages of testing and evaluation in order to map all the business processes. They then implemented the retail front-end systems along with modules to manage the financials and the supply chain, so that Annabelle would be able to optimally manage its franchise. When the implementation stage was over, AP&T conducted extensive training sessions with the company’s staff, so that Annabelle’s team would be able to get the most out of the system. To the satisfaction of the project management team and business sponsors, LS Nav was implemented in quick succession at all Annabelle’s new and existing stores in all four regions of the Middle East. “With no system in place, it was relatively easy to deploy LS Nav and streamline the complex and time-consuming manual processes that Annabelle used before,” says Archie Patrao, the Managing Director at AP&T Business Solutions LLC. “The challenge was to deploy the solution rapidly to avoid any further inventory and accounting problems, and to devise an effective method to ensure that the end users got familiar with the system as fast as possible.”