BJ’s Wholesale Club: Using SAP MaxAttention to Get the Most Out of SAP for Retail Solutions

SAP Business Transformation Study | Retail | BJ’s Wholesale Club

BJ’s Wholesale Club: Using SAP® MaxAttention™ to Get the Most Out of SAP for Retail SolutionsBJ’s Wholesale Club Inc. took a giant step toward serving its customers better – its top priority – by implementing SAP for Retail solutions. The deployment started well, but when it stalled, the company turned to SAP® MaxAttention™ services. With help from these foremost SAP software experts, BJ’s was soon back on track, realizing across-the-board benefits in its business.©

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“I wish we had understood what SAP MaxAttention was earlier, because it would have saved us a lot of time and money. To anyone considering SAP MaxAttention, I’d say to do it from the beginning.”Cornel Catuna, EVP of Club Operations, BJ’s Wholesale Club Inc.

BUSINESS TRANSFORMATION

Objectives • Provide the products that members want at the right price and the right quality

• Gain real-time visibility into the supply chain • Deliver tools to the company’s clubs to help them better serve the members

Resolution • Deployed SAP for Retail solutions without disruption • Engaged SAP® MaxAttention™ services • Established a laser focus on the top-priority issues

Benefits • Did a better job than ever keeping the right products on the shelves • Began solving problems within 2 weeks • Increased efficiency for business and IT personnel alike • Reduced operational cost and improved efficiency

CompanyBJ’s Wholesale Club Inc.

Headquarters Westborough, Massachusetts

IndustryRetail – warehouse club chain

Products and ServicesMembership-based wholesaler specializing in groceries, including fresh, canned, and frozen items, along with general merchandise including apparel, housewares, office equipment, small appliances, and gasoline

Employees>25,000

RevenueUS$12 billion

Web Sitewww.bjs.com


Executive overview

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45 minutesTo run dunning, down from 18 hours

2 minutesTo update stock status, down from 20 minutes

30%Improvement in overall system performance



The right help for successfully deploying SAP for Retail solutions

Executive overview

Company objectives

Resolution

Business transformation

Future plans

BJ’s Wholesale Club Inc. is a leading operator of wholesale, members-only clubs in the eastern United States, selling a vast array of products for the home.

Everything BJ’s does is member centric. The com-pany’s formula for success is to provide the products its members want at the right price and the right quality. Having real-time visibility of inventory and stocks was a challenge until BJ’s replaced its 25-year-old mainframe-based business software with SAP for Retail solutions. The SAP® software allowed the company to experience for the first time several essential functionalities for maintaining proper stocks, such as real-time inventories and sophisticated supply-chain management.

A BJ’s cross-functional team began by implementing the financials functionality from the SAP software, which went smoothly. When it moved on to the supply-chain and retail aspects of the software, however, it began experiencing challenges. Inventory visibility and accuracy, in particular, needed a great deal of improvement. When the situation reached the point where BJ’s had an inventory discrepancy in the tens of millions of dollars at the end of a fiscal year, the IT staff knew it required expert help. “That’s a lot of money to be missing at year-end, and we really needed to get the books back to where they should be,” says Cathleen Warren, VP of business transfor-mation at BJ’s. “We absolutely had to do better at making sure we had the right products in our clubs for our members, which is the most important thing for us as a company.”



Moving quickly from firefighting to proactive improvements

Executive overview

Company objectives

Resolution


Future plans

BJ’s turned to SAP MaxAttention™ services to address its challenges. “We made the decision to move forward with SAP MaxAttention because we knew they had the experience of seeing hundreds of customers through the woods and into the clear,” says Warren. “We needed a fresh set of eyes to come in and give us a new direction.”

Almost immediately, a team of experts from SAP MaxAttention was on board, working with BJ’s to review processes end to end, identify specific chal-lenges, and highlight critical tasks to be performed. Together, the teammates established a laser focus on the top-priority issues, and within two weeks they were able to identify, isolate, and remediate the sources of many of the problems, such as the inventory discrepancy.

After the experts from SAP MaxAttention systemati-cally resolved the outstanding issues, their role began to shift from firefighting to making proactive system improvements. One of the objectives was to help BJ’s to “Run SAP Like a Factory” by establishing an operations control center to monitor the performance of business processes and act on system alerts before underlying issues disrupt business continuity. The operations control center uses a system of dash-boards, sophisticated tools, and enhanced metrics to speed up issue detection and resolution. It provides a means to continuously improve business process performance and stability by analyzing trends and recurring incidents. It also automates manual monitor-ing activities and defines governance for a system-atic approach to system monitoring.



Sound recommendations lead to performance and savings

Executive overview

Company objectives

Resolution


Future plans

Use of the operations control center not only provides for smoother operations but also accelerates innova-tions for BJ’s, since basic monitoring activities can now be automated through SAP Solution Manager. Most issues can now be resolved by the level 1 support desk team using documented, guided procedures. This frees up experienced people from operational issues, allowing them to focus on strategic innova-tion projects.

Through hundreds of findings and recommendations, SAP MaxAttention services have stabilized and reduced processing times for many of the operations that BJ’s

runs daily. The monitors in place within the opera-tions control center measure the key business indicators of all 210-plus stores and distribution centers to make sure that management receives timely information to verify that each is running properly, and they can respond quickly to any abnormalities.

BJ’s is reducing costs because of heightened staff efficiency both among business users and in IT, which no longer spends time unproductively trying to fix software problems. The company is also improving revenue through real-time visibility of inventory across its entire supply chain.

300Tunings recommended by SAP MaxAttention

70%Faster issuance of purchase orders

89%Faster updating of vendor portal

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Maintaining the laser focus into the future

BJ’s Wholesale Club

Executive overview

Company objectives

Resolution


Future plans

BJ’s is doing a better job than ever of keeping the right products on shelves and is focusing on its more profitable assortments of products, as recommended by SAP for Retail solutions.

BJ’s has an extensive road map for taking advantage of additional functionality in SAP for Retail solutions. This includes improving the user experience and efficiency with SAP Fiori® apps and further enhancing the analytics capabilities.

“As our business challenges us to be more nimble and come up with more creative ways to improve our opera-tions, we have to find out how best to respond using our investment in SAP software. The services that SAP MaxAttention provides give us the accelerator to do that,” says Gregory Boucher, assistant vice president and manager of SAP software for BJ’s. “The SAP MaxAttention team has consistently helped us to drive value and reduce processing times for a lot of our programs.”

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BJ’s Wholesale Club: Using SAP MaxAttention to Get the Most Out of SAP for Retail Solutions