Crutchfield To Adopt Merchandising System Based on Dynamics AX

Published: April 11, 2007

by Alex Woodie

Electronics retailer Crutchfield will replace its custom-built merchandise management system (MMS) with a new ERP system based on Microsoft's Dynamics AX, the software giant reported last week.

Crutchfield has been selling its wares through catalogs since Bill Crutchfield ran into problems finding a car stereo that would fit into a Porsche 356 he was restoring more than 30 years ago. "I knew that I couldn't be the only person interested in car stereo[s]. The need for a national business to serve this niche seemed obvious," he says on his company's Web site.

More than 10,400 disassembled car dashboards later, Crutchfield has arguably the most accurate database of car stereo fitting guidelines on the planet. The retailer makes much of this information accessible over the Internet, which has enabled Crutchfield to take its business to another level.

While the Web has become huge at Crutchfield--not to mention new products such as flat-screen TVs--it's the back-office processes that will make or break the retailer. The company prefers to keep much of its inventory on hand in a 1.5 million square foot warehouse at its headquarters in Charlottesville, Virginia, which enables it to guarantee fast delivery of products around the world.

Keeping this warehouse stocked with the right mix of products is critical to Crutchfield, and the focus of its next-generation MMS. For that job, Crutchfield picked JunctionMCR, a multi-channel retail solution from Junction Solutions that is built on top of Microsoft's Dynamics AX ERP platform.

Crutchfield expects to reap several benefits from the new MMS, including the unification of vendor and item management into one environment, more efficient product procurement, improvements to forecasting, and the simplification of the user experience (Dynamics AX can use Office as its user interface).

Steve Weiskircher, vice president of IT at Crutchfield, says JunctionMCR will streamline the product procurement process. "By coupling better forecasting with automated purchasing workflow tools, we expect to dramatically improve the procurement process and provide deeper insight into item and vendor management processes," he says.

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