Macintosh Retail Group delivers cross-channel strategy

Macintosh Retail Group, a large-scale retailer in the lifestyle and fashion sector will deploy the Progress Pacific platform-as-a-service (PaaS) as part of modernisation of its key systems to facilitate for its customers - across all channels - the same seamless brand experience. The Netherlands-based retailer is the first major global company to deploy the technology introduced in August.

Macintosh Retail Group (MRG) with powerful retail and product brands has a nationwide coverage in the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxemburg and United Kingdom under the Brantano, Dolcis, Jones Bootmaker, Manfield, Invito, Scapino, PRO 0031, Steve Madden, Intreza and Kwantum names (approximately 1,000 stores). Specific to MRG is its cross-channel approach to clients by combining offline and online retail concepts with strong supply chain management and excellent back-office facilities and systems. Ordinarily MRG’s customer centric cross-channel approach would require an overhaul of almost all existing ICT systems, such as ERP (enterprise resource planning), point of sale, logistics and the website’s back-end systems, none of which had been originally designed with cross-channel capabilities. However, MRG opted instead to modernise its existing ERP system using the Progress Pacific platform, comprised of Progress Rollbase®, Progress OpenEdge® 11.3, Progress OpenEdge BPM and Progress Corticon® products, for faster time-to-market and to avoid the risk of a complete rebuild.

This modernisation project will be completed by working closely with Progress professional service teams and an offshore development team. Using its OpenEdge application development, OpenEdge BPM and Progress Corticon solutions for business process and business rules management, Progress will be able to upgrade the existing ERP system, enabling it to seamlessly connect the physical stores, online shops and marketplaces with the back-office, customer service and warehouse in real-time. As a result the Progress Pacific Platform - hosted in a private cloud - will allow, MRG to provide the customer with a unified experience across all channels.