C&A: Streamlining Retail Operations Across Europe

Challenge

C&A’s busi­ness man­agers need­ed to address sev­er­al crit­i­cal issues to boost their retail oper­a­tions. The man­u­al process of updat­ing store lay­outs was not only labor-inten­sive but also prone to errors. For instance, store man­agers need­ed up to two weeks to roll out updates across stores. This heavy reliance on paper also posed a notable envi­ron­men­tal impact, with high vol­umes of paper used for oper­a­tional tasks. Plus, the mul­ti­lin­gual envi­ron­ment of C&A’s Euro­pean stores com­pli­cat­ed con­tent dis­tri­b­u­tion and con­sis­ten­cy. Head­quar­ters couldn’t guar­an­tee all loca­tions received time­ly and accu­rate updates. A solu­tion was required to auto­mate these process­es, ensure time­ly updates, and sup­port mul­ti­ple lan­guages seamlessly.

Solutions

We set ambi­tious goals to auto­mate C&A’s store lay­out updates, aim­ing to reduce paper usage and improve over­all com­mu­ni­ca­tion across their exten­sive net­work of Euro­pean stores. One of the pri­ma­ry objec­tives was to sig­nif­i­cant­ly cut down on paper con­sump­tion in their 2000 stores, where each store pre­vi­ous­ly print­ed around 10 pages of updates week­ly. Togeth­er, we devel­oped a com­pre­hen­sive solu­tion to meet these needs.

• Our team of devel­op­ers cre­at­ed an effi­cient con­tent man­age­ment sys­tem using Umbra­co CMS. It stan­dard­is­es store lay­outs and allows effi­cient updates across mul­ti­ple loca­tions. Today all stores receive con­sis­tent and time­ly updates tai­lored to their indi­vid­ual needs. 
• To fur­ther sup­port store oper­a­tions, we devel­oped a cus­tom mobile appli­ca­tion with offline capa­bil­i­ties. This allows store man­agers to access essen­tial infor­ma­tion and per­form tasks with­out requir­ing con­stant inter­net connectivity.
• Recog­nis­ing the impor­tance of clear com­mu­ni­ca­tion, we imple­ment­ed an auto­mat­ed trans­la­tion sys­tem using arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence (Ope­nAI GPT). This ensures time-effi­cient con­tent dis­tri­b­u­tion across dif­fer­ent coun­tries, sig­nif­i­cant­ly speed­ing up the trans­la­tion process and C&A’s oper­a­tional efficiency.

Fur­ther­more, we devel­oped a dig­i­tal task man­age­ment sys­tem to stream­line the work­flow for store man­agers and staff. This clear­ly defines and tracks their dai­ly tasks, there­fore improv­ing over­all pro­duc­tiv­i­ty.