Since 1884, Breitling has been one of the world’s premier luxury watchmakers. But even a brand like needs help managing its inventory in order to limit stocking redundancies while providing customers with access to all of its products. , Breitling’s global director of digital technology, data and business applications, says the company had issues tracking its inventory for its boutiques and online stores under a unified system.
“Let’s say our customers go online and want to find a watch, but we don’t have stock in place,” he says. “And, on the other side, if a customer goes into a boutique and wants a watch, some of them are only available online and not at that particular boutique.” Due to the lack of a unified inventory system, Breitling couldn’t ensure that specific markets got the exact type of products they needed to fulfill customer demand.
Breitling also couldn’t determine what markets needed the most attention without a unified inventory system, causing out-of-stock and overstocking issues in many of the company’s major markets. Shanmugasundaram says that Breitling wanted to begin offering an omnichannel view of its inventory so that customers could purchase the watches they wanted and not be limited to what was available at the company’s brick-and-mortar stores. Improved inventory management would also cut back on stocking redundancies around the globe.
So, Breitling and Shanmugasundaram sought the help of an outside vendor. At the start, Brei.