Ashley Furniture Industries owns
and operates Ashley Furniture
HomeStore, the top-selling
furniture store brand in the world
and the number one retailer of
furniture and bedding in the
United States. Ashley Furniture
stores are located throughout the
United States, Canada, Mexico,
China, Central America, and Japan.
The company is expanding
domestically and abroad every day.
Goals
• Enable multi-billion dollar
growth
• Speed in-store checkout
• Expand buyer demographics
• Support continued change
Industry
Retail
Country or Region
United States
Customer Size
22,000 employees
Connect with Ashley Furniture
Furniture Company Supports
Omni-Channel Vision With
Flexible, Scalable Retail
Solution
“As we grow from a four billion dollar a year company to a ten
billion dollar a year company, Microsoft Dynamics for Retail will be
there, helping us open stores at the rate we need while supporting
our shift to omni-channel retail—something that no other furniture
company is doing today and that will help us differentiate from the
competition.”
Bob White, Executive Vice President and CIO,
Ashley Furniture Industries
After selling its products through mom-and-pop retailers, Ashley Furniture
Industries made the strategic decision ten years ago to open its own brickand-mortar stores. Since then, the company has grown into the top-selling
furniture store brand in the world and the number one retailer of furniture
and bedding in the United States.
To support the shift to running its own retail stores, Ashley Furniture built
its own retail management system. But by 2011, the system, which had
been in use for 11 years, was beginning to show its age and struggled to
keep up with the company’s rapid growth.
At the same time, Ashley Furniture was starting to expand globally, and
needed to localize many of its systems’ capabilities—including the
homegrown retail management system.
Choosing Microsoft Dynamics
Rather than undertake the task of localizing its retail management system,
leadership at Ashley Furniture began looking at commercial systems that
could support global growth, considering both Tier-1 enterprise resource
planning (ERP) systems and smaller, localized solutions.
“We began looking at regional solutions,” says Bob White, Executive Vice
President and CIO of Ashley Furniture. “But we realized that supporting
numerous separate local applications would create problems for IT. What
Microsoft Dynamics Decision Case Study
we really needed was a single solution that could support multi-currency,
multi-language, and the unique financial requirements for each country.”
With these requirements in mind, Ashley Furniture then considered Oracle
Retail. But after reviewing the solution for five months, it became clear to
Ashley Furniture that the Oracle solution posed several challenges. These
included its high cost, Ashley’s lack of access to the system’s source code,
and a perceived lack of commitment to the retail space from Oracle itself.
On the other hand, Ashley Furniture understood that Microsoft Dynamics
for Retail could support its broader retail management needs—without
the challenges posed by Oracle.
Bob White
Executive Vice President and CIO,
Ashley Furniture Industries
Working for Ashley Furniture for
more than seven years, Bob White
notes that the company has strived
to put its destiny in its own hands.
Although this originally meant
investing in its own brick-andmortar retail stores, it now means
being able to further shape the
future of the company through
technology. Most recently, White
has engaged Microsoft Services to
help the company do just that.
“We’re a manufacturer, not a
software shop,” he says, “While
Microsoft Services is providing
architecture, system configuration,
defining customizations, and even
building a lot of those
customizations for us, they are
ultimately providing us with a
strategy that will get us to selfsufficiency in the end.”
Connect with Bob
In addition, Microsoft Dynamics for Retail had one critical attribute that
made it stand out among the competition. Says White, “The most
important factor for us in choosing Microsoft Dynamics for Retail over
Oracle Retail was the immense investment Microsoft was pouring into its
product on a continuous basis. We appreciate Microsoft’s commitment to
both the product and the industry, and know that the solution will
continue to grow with us and get better over time.”
Initial Rollout and Future Plans
While initially working with a Microsoft partner to drive its rollout of
Microsoft Dynamics for Retail to two of its retail operations in China,
Ashley Furniture has since engaged Microsoft Services to help with one of
its much larger initiatives.
“We’re looking at growing from a four billion dollar a year business to a
ten billion dollar a year business by 2022,” says White. “To grow fast and
smart, we need an infrastructure in place that can support us. This meant
completely replacing our existing retail management system with
Microsoft Dynamics for Retail.”
In addition to replacing its existing system, the company also had two
business challenges it sought to address: speeding the in-store checkout
process (which could take from 30 to 45 minutes) for customers, and
appealing to a broader demographic. To achieve the latter, the company
pursued an omni-channel retail solution that was, as White puts it,
“Compelling, engaging, and personalized to the tastes of anyone from the
age of twenty to eighty.”
Jeff Paynter, Vice President of Omni-Channel Retail Systems for Ashley
Furniture, points to the capabilities of the solution’s latest release. He says,
“With Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 R3, we can leverage the commerce
runtime API layer to open up the architecture. In this way, we can create a
shopping cart in one channel and then migrate it to whatever channel the
customer happens to be using at that moment.”
By taking advantage of the solution’s API, Ashley Furniture also
understood it could connect the solution to its back-end systems,
including those for warehouse management, supply chain management,
and transportation. By doing this, the company could then provide pricing,
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availability, and delivery information directly to its customers or sales staff
working the showroom floor.
Up Close with an Omni-Channel Retail Solution
Slated to go live in 2015, Microsoft Dynamics for Retail will function as the
business logic and single repository of customer and sales information
behind the company’s many sales channels—new and old.
“Being able to work directly
with Microsoft Services—and,
as a result, have a direct line to
the solution product team for
—is critical. It allows us to pull
in experts as we need them
and weigh options so we can
quickly make decisions on
how to build this solution.”
Jeff Paynter, Vice President of
Omni-Channel Retail Systems,
Ashley Furniture
With the new solution, a potential customer will be able search for the
particular piece of furniture she wants on the Ashley Furniture HomeStore
website by using a range of criteria. After the customer finds the piece—
for example, a sectional sofa—the site presents a package of related items
to fit a room, as well as related promotional items, such as coupons. The
customer can then either add items to a shopping cart or to a wish list
after undergoing a short registration process, which includes the ability to
opt into email or text notifications for upcoming specials and promotions.
If that same customer decides she wants to try out the furniture before
buying, she can visit the nearby Ashley Future HomeStore.
Future plans for merging the physical and digital domains include an
Ashley Furniture app, which will draw on the customer’s account
information and wish lists to direct customers to specific pieces within the
retail stores, or use proximity awareness to push out coupons for nearby
items. Customers might even use the app to scan QR-codes on individual
pieces of furniture to bring up related information such its dimensions or
how to care for the product.
Of course, for customers that don’t download the app, a salesperson can
still help with the buying process. And by using a tablet that draws on
information from the underlying system, the salesperson can view the
customer’s wish list and take her to view the product.
Because the retail system is connected to the company’s warehouse
management, logistics, and transportation systems, the salesperson could
even inform the customer when the product would be delivered should
she buy it right then—information that would also be available to the
customer via other channels, including the web.
Armed with a credit-card reader and a financial transaction application, the
salesperson would also be able to close the deal on the spot, without
having to go look up information at a computer terminal or collect
printouts.
If the customer is still not convinced—for example, if she needs to go
measure a room or consult about the big-ticket purchase with her
spouse—the salesperson can email a confirmation code to her, enabling
her to click the link later that day, or that week, to complete the purchase.
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Ashley Furniture
Projected Results
with Microsoft
Dynamics for Retail
Increased
revenue
Faster in-store
checkout
Broadening of
customer
demographics
Approximately
U.S.$6billion a
year in
increased
revenue
between going
live in 2015 and
2022.
Reduction in instore checkout
time from 30-45
minutes to 5 or
6 minutes.
Broadening of
brand appeal to
customers
between the
ages of 20 and
80.
Projected Benefits
Replacing its legacy retail management system with Microsoft Dynamics
for Retail, Ashley Furniture aims to grow its annual revenue to U.S.$10
billion by 2022, shorten its in-store sales cycle to only a matter of minutes,
and make its brand appeal to a wider demographic. Helping the company
reach these goals, Paynter points to the benefits of the company’s
relationship with Microsoft Services. “We have a non-standard business
model,” he says. “Not only do we have our retail stores, but we also have
licensees. On top of this, there are many other intricacies to the way we do
business. Being able to work directly with Microsoft Services—and as a
result, have a direct line to the solution product team —is critical. It allows
us to pull in experts as we need them and weigh options so we can quickly
make decisions on how to build this solution.”
Enable Multi-Billion Dollar Growth
Supporting such considerable growth in revenue, Ashley Furniture sees
Microsoft Dynamics for Retail helping in two major ways. First, the solution
will give the company the scalable platform it needs to support expansion
from around 500 retail locations to potentially thousands in the coming
years. Second, the solution is flexible, enabling the company to support
new sales channels, such as those enabled by mobile apps.
Says White, “As we grow from a four billion dollar a year company to a ten
billion dollar a year company, Microsoft Dynamics for Retail will be there,
helping us open stores at the rate we need while supporting our shift to
omni-channel retail—something that no other furniture company is doing
today, helping us differentiate from the competition.”
Speed In-Store Sales Cycle
By using a single retail system, Ashley Furniture also aims to dramatically
shorten the in-store checkout process for customers.
Says Paynter, “Furniture is a big-ticket item, and the checkout process
today takes as long as 45 minutes as the salesperson manually enters the
SKUs, which they have to copy down from signs or merchandise as they
work with customers. With the new mobile POS system our goal is to cut
that time down to 5 or 6 minutes by allowing the salesperson to build the
shopping cart in real time while the customer walks through the store, and
then simply do a final review and check the customer out at the end.”
Expand Customer Base
Although it generally attracts an older demographic, Ashley Furniture
believes that by providing customers with a buying experience that can
map to their own, unique shopping styles, the company can then attract a
wider range of customer types. Of these new customers, Ashley Furniture
is most excited by the prospect of targeting digitally connected consumers
by providing the option to shop via smartphone, tablet, or home computer
and then growing the relationship from there, turning younger buyers into
long-time customers.
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Support Continued Change
A major key to enabling omni-channel retail is the Microsoft Dynamics for
Retail open API. But as Paynter notes, this open API doesn’t just mean the
company can support the new sales channels of today, it also gives the
company the confidence that it can support new channels that may arise
in the future. He says, “Customer buying habits will change. But by having
an open architecture, we can plug our business capabilities into whatever
new customer touch points might come in the future.”
Next Steps



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Connect with Microsoft Dynamics
Become a Dynamic Business
Learn more about Microsoft Dynamics for Retail
Learn more about how Microsoft Services can help you run an agile
competitive business
For more information about Microsoft Dynamics, go to:
www.microsoft.com/dynamics
This case study is for informational purposes only. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN
THIS SUMMARY.
Document published January 2014
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