Arcadia has announced the modernisation of its finance systems, through a partnership with Infor. The fashion giant has selected the vendor’s CloudSuite Financials & Supply Management solution to overhaul its finance systems and make them fit for the modern age.
Speaking to Essential Retail, Stewart Cruickshank, head of business solutions/IT at Arcadia, said the new solution will help the business evolve and support its international expansion.
“Our business is becoming ever more complex and diverse and the finance department is increasingly seen as a valued strategic enabler for the business,” he said. “This is a once-in-a-generation overhaul of an extremely complex systems landscape. It is an exciting opportunity, but a big challenge at the same time.”
Arcadia previously used a number of financial systems across its group of eight brands, and found its old solution was no longer sophisticated enough to handle flexible multi-currency, multi-calendar and multi-jurisdiction capabilities.
Because Infor’s solution is cloud based, Cruickshank explained this gives the finance team real-time access to critical data.
“We use data increasingly to help us make the smart, fact based decisions and believe that is becoming a significant differentiator in the retail space. We have a huge amount of data on product and customers, and we want to utilise that to the maximum to make optimal decisions.”
He added: “We really want to use information and data to support intelligent decision making and with a new system such as this, we’ll be able to give managers information at their fingertips, on their mobile devices and computers anywhere in the world.”
Cruickshank described how a buyer visiting a factory could use the real-time data to make a decision to buy the right stock.
“Our single biggest worry was that our systems could struggle to cope with the commercial opportunities that the business pursues. Beyond that, we need to be able to confidently support ever-increasing regulation, such as information security, GDPR and new accounting standards. We support and welcome this, and we need to be sure that we have a state of the art platform that can satisfy these demands.”
