Microsoft Supports Malaysian Retailer's Aggressive Plans to Expand

NEW YORK, Jan. 11 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- Microsoft Corp. today announced that MYDIN Mohamed Holdings Berhad of Malaysia (MYDIN) has decided on Microsoft Dynamics AX for Retail and Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 for its reporting and dashboards. MYDIN also decided on Profitbase Studio for its data warehouse and online analytical processing (OLAP) cubes to support its ambitious online growth plans for 2010. MYDIN's aggressive growth objectives and need for better, near-real-time information for its decision-makers and suppliers drove the decision. The announcement was made at the National Retail Federation (NRF) Annual Convention & Expo at the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center in New York.

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As a leader in store systems, business intelligence (BI) and digital marketing IT solutions for retail, Microsoft helps companies such as MYDIN build their competitive position in today's challenging economic environment.

MYDIN, Malaysia's largest homegrown retailer, plans to triple its stores from the present 49 to 125 by 2012. The No. 1 challenge for MYDIN's IT team is trying to make sense of 200 million transactions so that better business decisions are made in near-real time. The existing reporting system was not flexible -- it took two weeks to turn a report around, and ad hoc analysis was nonexistent.

"We have a situation where our IT infrastructure for reporting is not able to keep up with the expansion of store formats and the number of stores," said Malik Murad Ali, IT director for MYDIN. "We currently have two enterprise resource planning and two point-of-sale systems. We are migrating our core ERP to Microsoft Dynamics AX over the next two years, but until that happens we need a way to consolidate the data from these systems and provide the reports and dashboards that our people and suppliers need to make better decisions."

MYDIN is implementing Microsoft Dynamics AX for Retail to drive major operational improvements by automating and integrating critical retail processes from stores to supply chain. This will also enable centralized management of retail stores with near-real-time information, which will prepare MYDIN for its planned business growth.

With its growth strategy well under way, MYDIN's IT team put a strategic plan in place that included upgrading and consolidating its IT infrastructure, adopting a data warehouse and OLAP cube solution that supported the Association for Retail Technology Standards (ARTS) data standard, in which information from its existing and future business systems could be consolidated.

MYDIN decided on Profitbase 2009 to consolidate data from two enterprise resource planning (ERP) and two point-of-sale (POS) systems because of the easy-to-use development environment and the ready-to-use OLAP cube templates for retail that support the ARTS data standard. The retail templates can be deployed quickly and provide metrics for item sales, hourly sales, hourly item sales, efficiency and much more. Standard dimensions are provided for sorting and filtering the NRF's ARTS metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs) and include store, store type, department, category, article, hour, day, week and month. In addition, the Profitbase finance OLAP cube template will be used to group the ERP general ledgers so that a consolidated financial status of the company is available automatically.

Microsoft Technology for Information Delivery and Analysis

MYDIN is deploying Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 to provide all levels of the organization and its suppliers with information. Dashboards and scorecards, which will have standard financial and retail KPIs, will be deployed for everyone from the board of directors and executive management to central merchandisers, branch operations managers and suppliers. In addition, analysis capability will be provided for robust data mining and ad hoc analysis.

"MYDIN demonstrates how retailers today can use IT to prepare for growth in this challenging economic environment," said Brendan O'Meara, managing director for the Worldwide Retail Industry group at Microsoft. "The innovative use of IT can enable retailers to dramatically reduce costs, attract and retain customers, and accelerate business growth to gain competitive advantage. Through delivery of better-connected shopping experiences, online retailers such as MYDIN can enhance their brand and cement customer loyalty by adding tangible value in today's environment, in which customers are increasingly in control."

"With the Profitbase-Microsoft BI solution, we expect to have better visibility to our top-selling products, allowing us to make sure adequate store inventory levels are maintained," Ali said. "We also will share product inventory levels with our suppliers so they can better service our stores. Overall, with better visibility and the resulting optimization and proactive decision-making, we expect a positive impact to the bottom line of at least 5 percent."

About Microsoft in Retail

Microsoft is the leading provider of global retail information technology solutions. Microsoft is No. 1 in store systems, in terms of retail point-of-service operating systems. Microsoft also is the leader in business intelligence with the vast majority of retailers using Excel as a decision support tool. Microsoft also leads in digital marketing with the most comprehensive end-to-end solutions. Its digital marketing solutions range from the stack (Windows, Windows Server, SQL Server, .NET, Visual Studio) to online (Commerce Server) to mobile (Windows Mobile), and from digital advertising (Bing, adCenter) to entertainment (Xbox, Xbox LIVE, Zune, Silverlight). Microsoft delivers connected experiences for stores, commerce and the enterprise via the "three screens" (PC, browser, mobile) for easy access across your digital world.

Microsoft's Retail Group provides software that helps retailers thrive in today's competitive global marketplace by meeting the demand for a highly personalized and connected shopper experience. Microsoft helps retailers deliver a consistent shopping experience through seamless multichannel integration and via innovative technologies and mobile and new social networking channels. Through a combination of Microsoft- and partner-based solutions, retailers can turn data into insight, ideas into action and change into opportunity. More information about Microsoft's Retail Group can be found at http://www.microsoft.com/retail.

About Microsoft

Founded in 1975, Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) is the worldwide leader in software, services and solutions that help people and businesses realize their full potential.

SOURCE Microsoft Corp.