Black Friday readiness: Scaling for success

Challenges of the peak season

Black Friday amplifies every structural weakness within a retail enterprise. The core challenges revolve around unprecedented transaction volume, speed, and accuracy:

• Omnichannel expectation vs. execution: Customers expect a unified experience. A global omnichannel retailer, has achieved market-leading capabilities, such as ship-from-store and click & collect. In some markets, order-from-store accounts for a significant percentage of transactions, ensuring fewer customers leave empty-handed.
• Inventory invisibility: A lack of real-time insight into stock levels across all sales channels can be catastrophic during peak volume, leading to lost sales due to perceived shortages. Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management (SCM) provides the necessary overview to synchronize inventory visibility in real-time. A business we support used D365 F&O to unify the management of its entire supply chain, distribution center, and regional warehouses – critical when handling a vast catalog of products.
• Fragmented operations: Relying on disparate IT systems for POS, accounting, and the supply chain creates limited control. A company we've partnered with replaced multiple legacy applications (SAP, POS, WMS, online order tools) with a single, integrated Dynamics 365 platform, achieving unified systems and operational efficiency.

Potential threats

• System overload and failure: Legacy or local systems risk complete operational failure. For one of our clients, DeliveredSoft implemented a future-ready ERP platform designed to support acquisitions and expansion, unifying their massive operations across 140 stores, 1,200+ POS devices, and two e-commerce platforms within a single, powerful solution. This stability is crucial when handling volume metrics like the tens of thousands of daily POS transactions and several thousand daily e-commerce orders retailer manages, which can process multiple times the typical volume during peak times.
• Inaccurate promotions and pricing: Executing complex promotions without centralized data is a recipe for errors. Our partner introduced an automated coupons feature, using logic-driven generation (e.g., a coupon for product X after a set time from purchasing product Y) that is seamlessly emailed to customers. This level of integration ensures promotions work flawlessly at scale.
• Logistical bottlenecks: A fragile supply chain, often struggling to keep up with rapid trend changes, faces collapse if demand planning and fulfillment visibility (SCM) are not optimized, resulting in shipping delays and stockouts.

Unified commerce as a solution

Dynamics 365 Commerce, naturally integrated with Finance and Supply Chain Management, transforms this high-stakes environment into a streamlined operation built for scale.

• Customer personalization: Using unified customer profiles, D365 Commerce enables hyper-personalization. A brand we've helped transform successfully launched a global loyalty program, rapidly onboarding all European stores and countries and adding hundreds of thousands of new customers, all powered by the scalable D365 loyalty engine.
• Real-time price consistency: Price and experience consistency are essential. A leading retailer implemented Electronic Shelf Labels that provide real-time price and product description updates across all stores, virtually eliminating pricing errors.

Scalability and security with Azure

The efficiency and resilience of the Dynamics 365 suite are fundamentally dependent on the Microsoft Cloud (Azure).

• Guaranteed scalability: The cloud provides the dynamic elasticity necessary to handle the sales growth of Black Friday, ensuring the system can scale instantly to meet demand without crashing. A key customer's global rollout of standardized payment processes was completed rapidly across all key markets, demonstrating the platform's power to streamline global operations and exceed customer expectations.
• High availability: Microsoft guarantees service availability at a high level (up to 99.9%) and continuously develops and updates the platform, reducing the maintenance costs and risks associated with outdated systems.
• Real-time data access: Dynamics 365 in the cloud provides access to data everywhere, on any device, in real time, which is key for rapid decision-making in merchandising, stock allocation, and customer service.
• Empowering frontline workers: Dynamics 365 Commerce equips retail staff with Mobile POS terminals to process transactions and access crucial product information anywhere in the store, streamlining the buying process for customers. A retailer we work with supported its vision to remove traditional cash desks by rolling out the Microsoft Store Commerce application for mobile POS. This approach gave staff a flexible solution that enhanced the in-store experience and minimized reinvestment in hardware.

Ready to handle the rush?

Black Friday demands a retail system that is not only robust and integrated but also intelligent and infinitely scalable. Microsoft Dynamics 365 Commerce, Finance, and Supply Chain Management, underpinned by the power of Microsoft Cloud, offer the resilience and insight required to turn peak season pressure into peak profits.

Don't let legacy system worries compromise your biggest sales opportunity. Contact DeliveredSoft today for a personalized consultation, optimization plan, or a detailed performance analysis of your current retail solution.