Implementation

We offer a collaborative and agile approach combining your business and technical experts, vendor product experts, and our program managers to integrate all project activities and deliver results on time and within budget.

Effective program management reduces costs, improves decision-making, raises morale, and provides long-lasting results.  Our project managers combine disciplined governance, flexibility, and an understanding of the big picture gained through deploying complex retail systems. 

Benefits of working with Cambridge Retail Advisors:

• Pragmatic and timely decision making from Project Managers with combined PMO expertise and deep retail domain knowledge
• Adaptable methodologies including agile
• Coordination of all project tasks, including vendor responsibilities, into a single project plan

Examples of our project management work:

• Assisted a national specialty grocery chain manage a chain rollout of updated POS software
• Managed the complete implementation lifecycle of inventory management, WMS, and OMS solutions for a multi-brand specialty retailer
• Lead the implementation of new systems for merchandise planning, assortment planning, and allocation for a national specialty retailer.

Functional Solution Design

Our agile approach to functional solution design allows you to capture exactly what the software needs to do in order to meet the needs of the business users. 

We utilize a sprint-based workshop methodology so you can see rapid progress and provide immediate feedback.  In addition to structuring and managing the process, our designers also have a deep understanding of retail business processes and can help identify cross-functional issues and opportunities during the design phase.

Benefits of working with Cambridge Retail Advisors:

• Awareness of industry trends and how leading competitors are evolving their processes to new business imperatives
• Efficient modeling of alternatives based on end-to-end process knowledge of experienced professionals
• Accelerated solution design using detailed process templates developed over hundreds of projects

Examples of our functional solution design work:

• Assisted a vertically integrated hardlines retailer/manufacturer design new end-to-end procurement processes as part of an ERP deployment
• Led design workshops to define an assortment planning process for a regional specialty retailer
• Defined new omnichannel customer order fulfillment processes for a national specialty retailer

Technical Architecture

Retailers are at a pivotal point in which information across multiple functional areas needs to be better connected, combined, and shared. 

Our team will help you modernize your entire technology stack based on proven and emerging technologies.

Benefits of working with Cambridge Retail Advisors:

• Accelerated design, testing and deployment of complex retail architectures such as payment processing, omnichannel order fulfillment and RFID

Examples of our technical architecture work:

• Managed the conversion from on-premise inventory management and customer data systems to a cloud architecture 

System Integration

Our services include developing system integration frameworks and the integration layers for enterprise applications, data, and EDI. 

In addition to building the integrations, we also assist our clients in preparing product and customer data for conversion. 

Our methodology includes data cleansing and transformation along with mock conversions to ensure new systems are populated with clean data.

Benefits of working with Cambridge Retail Advisors:

• Efficiently design and build an integration architecture aligned to transaction volumes and processing windows
• Coordination of complex testing and mock conversion activities to ensure smooth production conversions

Examples of our system integration work:

• Directed the design, build, test, and deployment of an integration framework to support the consolidation of a multi-brand retailer onto a single application platform for inventory management
• Managed all aspects of an omnichannel POS conversion for a global specialty retailer

Testing and Quality Assurance

The cumulative effort for all phases of testing including unit, integration, system, regression, and UAT testing represents a significant portion of any implementation project. 

We can work with you to create overall test strategies, build test scripts, and coordinate all phases of testing.

Our experience successfully implementing all major retail systems (POS, merchandising, order management, eCommerce, warehouse management, etc) enables us to maintain a current database of thousands of use cases that can be used to significantly accelerate your testing efforts.