One may cover that a garden center and a plant martial are a seasonal business. Not so with the US Merrifield Garden Center : The company continues to develop in order to meet the needs of its customers all year round.
Since his beginning in 1971, Merrifield has developed into one of the largest full service garden centers, tree nurseries and landscape construction companies in its region-with over 600 employees and over 70 hectares of plants, lands and sales areas in North Virginia. The business comprises three garden centers that run plants, garden needs and decorative items; an online shop; a wholesale department that supports other local landscape construction companies; a material production division that recycles materials from landscapes; As well as self -branded products that are specially tailored to the environmental conditions in the Washington area, DC.
Of course, the company has increased and developed over the years to meet the changing industry and customer standards. However, its founding principles, excellent customer service and an unsurpassed selection of plants and products are still available. This also applies to the systems for the products and services in the retail division of Merrifield. With his omnichannel strategy, it is important that Merrifield offers a consistent, seamless and personalized experience in all of his contact points with customers.
Development into a modern, technology -savvy company
Fortunately, CFO Lynn Warhurst has made it one of her personal goals since entering the company in 1978 to equip the company with IT. “There was zero it … so we knew that we had to change something if we wanted to grow and be successful,” she said.
At the beginning of the 2000s, Merrifield became aware of SAP at a NRF event. In 2013, the company finally put SAP ERP Central Component (SAP ECC) into operation. You wanted to replace the 20-year-old garden center altual system and offer the company modern audit trail functions and higher data reliability.
In the continuation of his long-term innovation partnership with SAP SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition for retail, fashion and vertical business its SAP ECC system to the cloud.
According to Warhurst, the Merrifield Garden Center records up to 300 transactions per hour and location. Therefore, the company needs a solution with a higher processing speed that can handle a high volume of retail transactions. In addition, the company also wanted a system that supports Apple Pay and Google Pay, offers functions for the tracking of customer loyalty and data analyzes and ensures the safety of the company and compliance.
And last but not least, Merrifield also wanted to bring his retail and wholesale division together on a platform instead of hosting them on separate solutions. “We knew that (SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition) can handle our complex processes and offer us the depth of detail that we need for our business and our growth,” said Warhurst. “After 54 financial years, both business areas will run on the same platform. It is great that we can now use clerk for both individual and wholesale, because we become more efficient as a company.”
SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition for retail, fashion and vertical business is a new solution that was launched in January of this year. The ERP solution was specially developed for retail and is tailored to the complex requirements of the industry in terms of scaling, merchandising, branch operation and supply chains. The flexibility of the public cloud architecture helps to standardize and integrate industry-specific processes with immediately ready-to-use integrations.
Merrifield also implements the SAP Omnichannel Sales Transfer and Audit solution to fully present sales transactions across several channels, improve data reporting and comply with local regulations.
Strong partnerships create the foundation for success
To simplify his cloud transformation, Merrifield won syntax as an implementation partner on board. “A trustworthy partner is very important,” said Warhurst. Merrifield has been working with Syntax since 2018.
For switching to SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition for retail, fashion and vertical business, Syntax was on site at Merrifield. As a result, the Syntax employees were able to experience the current system of Merrifield Live and understand better what the company considers in this transformation, said Warhurst. Together they defined the aspects of solving and integration, data migration and business continuity as priorities. Syntax and SAP are now working to include existing project gaps to a solution released in August.
“Syntax and SAP were really great. We are one of the first companies to use the public cloud for retail and they were always there for us,” said Warhurst. “It was very important to find someone who believed in us and was there for us. And I think that’s really one of the most important factors for our success.”
The productive start of the new system is planned for September. The project is currently in the configuration and implementation phase, and Merrifield looks forward to the future. The holistic, cloud-based omnichannel solution will ensure that trustworthy data from all business areas are fully available in one place. It will help the garden center to achieve its goals, open up further locations and to accept new online offers.
Gillian Hixson is integrated communications specialist at SAP.
Image above with the kind permission of SAP employee Tom Lennart-Krupp.
