Vitamin Shoppe is a leading retailer of vitamins, supplements and sports nutrition for the entire family. Through their three powerhouse brands the Vitamin Shoppe®, Super Supplements® and Nutri-Force® their goal is to inspire everybody to be healthy. With over 700 stores in the United States and continuing international expansion, they aim to help people live healthier lives.
Challenges
Vitamin Shoppe wanted to upgrade their homegrown, legacy Order Management System (OMS). The old OMS did not have all the features that that Vitamin Shoppe needed, such as marketing and financial statistics, and the ability to see orders across all systems and channels. Vitamin Shoppe, therefore, decided to purchase IBM/Sterling Order Management system. However, they needed help implementing this system and customizing it to fit their needs. Also, this new OMS system was not compatible with their old Enterprise Service Bus system, so they also needed to upgrade this ESB system as well.
The Solution
Akvarr joined Vitamin Shoppe to bring in a team of world class of Java programmers to design, develop, implement and document IBM’s OMS system, as well as the new ESB system, and made sure that the two were fully compatible with each other.
Result
The completion of this project by Akvarr gave a more robust, streamlined, and centralized system to Vitamin Shoppe. This also provided a better shopping experience for customers, who could now place an online order to be delivered or picked up in the store. Stores also now had a real time visibility into inventory details within the store and in the distribution center. All in all, Vitamin Shoppe has seen a 30% cost reduction in inventory management and a 25% increase in productivity of order management and time to market of customer orders.
