Northwind Retail: one stock truth across 14 stores

Overview

Northwind Retail runs 14 homeware stores plus a fast-growing webshop. Each store kept its own stock counts, the warehouse ran a separate ERP, and the webshop synced once a night — so popular lines sold online after they had already left the shelf.

The challenge

Daily oversells, manual end-of-day reconciliation, and no reliable picture of what was actually available to promise. Peak weekends made it worse: staff re-counted shelves by hand while the phones rang.

Our approach

We mapped every stock movement across tills, warehouse and web, then built a lightweight integration layer on top of the existing ERP — no rip-and-replace. Live sync runs every few minutes, with a dashboard showing store, warehouse and in-transit levels in one place.

What changed

Oversells dropped to isolated exceptions, end-of-day reconciliation disappeared, and buyers finally plan from real numbers. The webshop now shows honest availability, and store staff check stock on tablets instead of walking the aisles.