Invenio setup up Sharaf DG's international e-commerce capabilities
Established in 1975, Sharaf Group is one of the UAE’s largest and most respected business conglomerates. Sharaf DG is a relatively new arm of the Sharaf group, founded in 2005 and specialising in the online retail of electronics. From humble beginnings, Sharaf DG now has over 26 stored in UAE and Bahrain.
Business Challenges
The main issue faced by Sharaf DG was the fact that their current ecommerce infrastructure was only designed to sell within one country – The UAE. It was completely incapable of selling into other countries. In order to expand the electronic retail branch of the business into other regions, the back-end selling systems of the business needed to be updated and enhanced.
On top of this, Sharaf DG was experiencing a high number of customer complaints, mainly due to irregularities in online and store stock levels. Customers were ordering stock to be picked up or delivered, but the IT infrastructure could not resolve or track stock levels, leaving them with nothing to collect from their chosen branch, or no delivery arriving.
This problem was compounded by the fact that, despite being a major retailer in the Middle East, Sharaf DG’s online order management systems did not have ‘Arabic Language’ support. This means that orders using those languages were not being processed by the system, resulting in them having to be processed manually instead. This led to multiple errors and frustrated customers who were unable to track their orders because they were never put into the system. Because the ecommerce platform was not integrated with communication gateways, online shoppers were left in the dark, causing a high volume of calls to their customer care line to check on the status of their orders.
Invenio's Solution
Using all of this information, Invenio’s delivery team were able to design a flexible and configurable country selection system (allowing countries and languages to be added in a modular fashion), which was seamlessly integrated into their existing infrastructure. This system helped Sharaf DG extend their offerings to multiple countries at any time with a single configuration change, helping boost the possibility of further growth. The team at Invenio were also able to:
- Extend the STR (stock transfer request) to enable stores to transfer stock based on order requests
- Include a STR acceptance and rejection function, which would automatically accept or reject transfer requests based on current stock levels. The same system would then update the stores stock levels to reflect the order
- Customise and tailor an ‘out of the box’ solution in order to integrate it into Sharaf DG’s current systems and give them flexibility for product upgrades
- Added multi-lingual support, so hundreds of other languages can be used with a simple configuration change
The Results
From the day Invenio implemented this streamlined country inclusion and stock management solution, Sharaf DG started to see real differences:
Increased customer satisfaction
Stock management levels between stores improved
Automated across boarders
Online orders from multiple regions were being processed smoothly, without the need for manual processing at any point
Faster expansion capabilities
Sharaf DG were able to expand their electronics retail business into Qatar smoothly, and are now planning to move into other regions thanks to the simple country inclusion programme
Greater efficiency
Operations and business functions within the UAE were greatly improved
Invenio’s hybrid subject matter experts and technical architects worked closely with the IT management staff of Sharaf DG to create a tailored solution that would not only improve their current operations within the UAE, but allow them to seamlessly expand into new regions and countries without any teething problems. They created ready to use, re-usable components that were able to solve their business challenges, reduce the time to market with new branches and improve their customer relationships, all of which have had a significant impact on their business.