Retail ERP Transformation

UrbanMart Retail operates a chain of apparel and lifestyle stores alongside a growing online storefront, but the two sides of the business run on entirely separate systems. Store inventory is tracked in a legacy point-of-sale system, the online storefront pulls stock levels from a manually updated spreadsheet, and pricing changes have to be entered in three different places to stay consistent.

This creates recurring problems: online customers occasionally order items already sold out in-store, seasonal pricing updates take days to roll out fully, and the finance team spends a significant part of every month-end reconciling sales data pulled from disconnected sources. As the online channel grows, these gaps become more visible and more costly, to the point where patching the existing setup further is no longer a sustainable option.

A phased Dynamics 365 Business Central implementation forms the operational core, with Dynamics 365 Commerce integration layered on top to unify the online storefront with in-store inventory and pricing. The rollout is sequenced to reduce risk: finance and core inventory management go live first, giving the team a stable foundation and a chance to validate data migration accuracy before adding complexity.

Commerce integration follows in a second phase, connecting the existing online storefront to the new Business Central backend through a dedicated integration layer. Store-level go-live is staggered across locations over several weeks, with each store running a short parallel period alongside the legacy point-of-sale system before full cutover.

The design centres on a single source of truth for inventory and pricing, with both store point-of-sale and the online storefront reading from and writing to the same Business Central data model in real time, rather than syncing on a delay.

Engagements of this type typically result in a single, real-time view of stock and orders across every channel — removing the manual cross-checking that otherwise consumes staff time as an online channel scales.

Typical areas of improvement include a simplified month-end reconciliation process, since sales data no longer needs to be pulled and matched from separate systems, and fewer customer-facing stock discrepancies once online and in-store inventory reflect the same real-time source.