Office Business Application with Dynamic RMS is user friendly and provides deep business analysis.

“With the Office Business Application, I’ve cut the amount of time I spend producing reports and doing other essential tasks in half because I don’t have to spend time figuring out how to do things.”
John Brooks, Chief Operating Officer, Capitol Nutrition

The nutrition and sports supplements industry is a tough business, with national, regional, and local companies competing to offer the lowest prices on products. Capitol Nutrition, which plans to become a large regional player, needed technology that could easily track retail data, such as inventory levels or the cost of goods sold on a particular day. Capitol Nutrition found the answer with an Office Business Application (OBA) from Professional Advantage, a Microsoft® Certified Partner. Using the OBA, Capitol Nutrition can take information from Microsoft Dynamics™ Retail Management System software and analyze it in Microsoft Office Excel® 2007 spreadsheets. Using Office Excel, company employees can quickly and easily analyze and report on critical business data, which helps the company maintain a competitive edge.

Situation

Capitol Nutrition is a nutritional supplements company operating in Illinois and Indiana. In
1999 the company started with a single store. Today it operates three retail stores, a
warehouse distribution center in Mokena, Illinois, and provides products on the Web at
bestpricenutrition.com. By 2008, the company plans to be operating a total of
seven stores. John Brooks, Chief Operating Officer for Capitol Nutrition, says the organization’s goal is to compete with much larger nutritional supplements companies by being aggressive on pricing. For this business strategy to work Capitol Nutrition needs to closely monitor inventory levels at its stores. “Our products are discounted heavily across the board,” says Brooks, “so the margin for error is very small.”

As the company has grown over the past several years, it installed a number of different IT systems and applications to help manage the business. One of the products is Microsoft® Dynamics™ Retail Management System (RMS), which provides retailers with a complete point-of-sale (POS) solution that can be adapted to meet specific retail requirements. Capitol Nutrition uses Microsoft Dynamics RMS to track the sales of more than 4,000 SKUs that go through both its physical stores as well as its Web channel. Brooks notes that the company’s system could not provide a key feature that he believes is critical for the company’s longterm business strategy—the ability to quickly and accurately monitor and forecast product levels in stores. The company needed this in order to set up an automated system for replenishing inventory.

“Our goal was to get away from simply drop shipping large quantities of items between
our stores and our warehouse,” Brooks says. “It was inefficient because of inaccurate
product or quantity deliveries. This hurt our business because customers could not
always find what they wanted. We needed a solution that could help us understand store
stock levels each day so we could plan accordingly—and to make sure that every customer who walks in a store can find what they want.”

Capitol Nutrition tried to build a solution internally and found that maintaining the solution for their changing business was too difficult. They hired outside assistance, but the resulting solution was not flexible enough and lacked features Brooks required.

Solution

Working with Professional Advantage, a Microsoft Certified Partner, Capitol Nutrition
deployed an Office Business Application (OBA) that is based on the Professional Advantage (PA) solution, Retail Analytics and Merchandise Planning (RAMP) for Microsoft RMS. RAMP helps retailers by delivering analytical reporting on business performance.

Using the technology, Capitol Nutrition can easily identify trends, buying patterns,
seasonality, and other key performance indicators for retail businesses. Capitol Nutrition users can convert data entered into Microsoft Dynamics RMS, within the PA RAMP product, which in turn helps them analyze information such as margins, revenues, sell-through rates, and cost of goods sold.

The solution is user friendly for all Capitol Nutrition’s employees. Each Employee can easily access and manipulate information on their retail sales and inventory levels in Microsoft Excel. This is a key feature for Capitol Nutrition, which uses the 2007 Microsoft Office system extensively. Brooks says he relies heavily on Microsoft Office Excel® 2007 to understand the company’s business sales.

Snap Shot

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Industry: Retail-Specialty retailing

Customer Profile: Capitol Nutrition, based in Mokena, Illinois, is a nutritional supplements company. It employs 14 people.

Business Situation:
The company needed technology to predict when stores were running low on specific products and to perform other business tasks, such as helping determine the cost of goods sold.

Solutions:
The company deployed an Office Business Application from Professional Advantage. Employees can now use Microsoft® Office Excel® 2007 to easily access and manipulate data from Microsoft Dynamics™ Retail Management System software.

Benefits:

50 percent less time spent on reporting
Accurate data updated frequently
Long-term business processes enhanced