Retail Business
Microsoft Dynamics AX

“Alfapeople had consultants, who were not only experienced with Dynamics AX, but also in retail control, suppliers’ management, financial as well, and really understood best practices and our operations.”

Mr. Hameed Khojah, Circle K’ IT Director.

Business Needs

The Circle K convenience store chain got its start in 1951, when Fred Hervey bought three Kay’s Food Stores in El Paso, Texas. The company began franchising in 1999. Today, Circle K has become one of the most widely recognized convenience store brands, known worldwide for quality products and great customer service. Founded in January 2017 with plan to operate 350 C Stores, Circle K Saudi Arabia franchise were awarded by Alesayi Group, right now Circle K one of the fastest growing leading modern C stores brand in the Saudi market. A key challenge was to find the right technology to underpin the future business.

After a thorough, ten-month software selection process, Circle K was looking for a World Class solution that support business growth, dynamic functionalities to improve data analysis and decision making and meet the new C-Store concept in Saudi Arabia.

Circle K worked with AlfaPeople for 3 months in the diagnostic and planning phases of the project. The team prefer an out of the box solution with as few customizations as possible since the C-Store concept in Saudi Arabia is entirely new to the market and never been implemented before.

Saudi Arabia’s Convenience Stores market continues its rapid grow, with several leading Saudi and international retailers expanding operation in response to stiff competition and changing consumers’ preferences, which lead the Circle K’s management working to get goods to stores in the most cost-effective manner, along with user-friendly interface and extensive tracking abilities made for the right system to track inventory and manage payments in real-time making more information readily available, providing more visibility, especially with financial data.

“Alfapeople team worked collaboratively with employee groups within the company making a great combination, Alfapeople had consultants, who were not only experienced with Dynamics AX, but also in retail control, suppliers’ management, financial as well, and really understood best practices and our operations”, said Mr. Hameed Khojah, Circle K’ IT Director.

Solution

Alfapeople successfully implements Microsoft Dynamics AX Retail at Circle K as their enterprise resource planning (ERP) business solution and single system of record.

The time was the real challenge for both Alfapeople and Circle K team, AlfaPeople have accepted the challenge by implementing AX Retail system live up and running within a short span of only five weeks using out-of-the-box Retail add-on for AX designed and configured to best fit C-Store’s concept for local market needs and practices along with new services that never been implemented in Saudi market before.

Setting up storefronts at up to 350 Circle K conventions in the coming two years requires a significant amount of preparation work for Circle K at its home office. AX Retail will provide a POS solution that could connect its front-end sales with its back- end inventory management with ability to manage inventory in real time without hampering the growth of the company.

On the back-office side, AX Retail enables Circle K to access inventory and other sales reports through Power BI analytics and reporting systems, Master Planning (Replenishment) to decide what needs to be reordered, sales promotion and pricing management, create purchase orders and have products shipped to the next convention city.

Benefits

Low total cost of ownership

Low TCO through a single integrated system with full retail capabilities, from powerful price management to point-based customer loyalty programs and automatically generated end-of-day statements through a system that scales with the company’s expansion.

Unified platform, complete visibility and management reporting

All project information is held centrally, there are several Key features to Circle K’s business processes that have helped the company meet its goals of achieving greater visibility and access to information, automating manual processes and unifying the platform so the entire organization is operating off the same set of data.

High user adaptation for speedy training

Due to frequent turnover in retail locations, Circle K required a system with a low learning curve and high user adaptation. Microsoft Dynamics AX’s user-friendly graphical interface sped up the training process and allowed retail associates to learn in a live test environment. These up-to- date environments show the current system modules and permissions, thus reducing mistakes in the future.