Mackintosh partners with Xpedition to enhance their end-to-end business fashion solution

Background

For almost 200 years Mackintosh has been one of the world’s most influential coat makers. The brand is synonymous with craftsmanship, expertise in outerwear and constant design innovation. Alongside its classic raincoats, Mackintosh’s new collections include Mackintosh Mainline and collaborations with some of the world’s leading fashion houses.

Mackintosh sells through its Retail stores, Online and to Wholesale clients as well as an established digital marketplace. The firm operates three warehouses and two factories in Scotland and the Northwest of England.

The challenge

Maintaining a critical fashion business management system

Like many fashion and apparel businesses, Mackintosh runs a streamlined IT operation with limited in-house resource. The firm relies on Microsoft Dynamics as an ERP solution to support manufacturing, warehousing, store and online operations, as well as to manage and report on purchasing, sales and financial performance.

Data and transactions in Dynamics enable financial and operational oversight and control, from fabric inventory and stock management to importing sales orders from the digital sales channel and wholesale clients.

From cutting to finishing, quality checking, packing, dispatch, shipment and invoicing, Dynamics gives Mackintosh the ability to manage their core apparel production business from one single, end-to-end business fashion solution.

Maintaining the platform is critical to smooth business operations and to sustain optimal efficiency across the organisation. As the business evolves, Mackintosh also needs the ability to customise and extend Dynamics functionality. The Mackintosh team enlist Xpedition for help and advice to enhance their solution with additional functionality and efficiency to help them improve operational performance and manage costs.

The support solution

Xpedition expertise, consulting and system support on-demand

Xpedition is Mackintosh’s trusted partner for day-to-day support for the Dynamics platform, chosen for our in-depth knowledge of the fashion industry. The Xpedition team also provides advice when Mackintosh wants to use the system in new ways or extend its capability.

IT Manager Darren Moat says, “We have a strong and established relationship with Xpedition’s team. Over the years they have demonstrated their experience both in the fashion and apparel sector and with the Dynamics solution: they fully understand how our business works and what we need and expect from the technology to achieved a desired solution to a problem. When we pose a question, we always get an expert answer within the allotted timescales.”

Xpedition has assisted in developing specialist functionality for Mackintosh’s store and online operations, integrating specialist point of sale software, stock synchronisation and wholesale order management within the Dynamics platform. The Xpedition team also helped Mackintosh improve the management of raw materials by migrating several legacy systems into Dynamics. As a result, this provides Mackintosh with a single reliable overview of stock levels in all our warehouses and factories. By increasing efficiency and reducing waste, this also helps Mackintosh operate a more sustainable and profitable business.

The Dynamics advantage

A custom fashion business solution for a lean, modern organisation

Mackintosh uses Dynamics with the fully integrated K3|pebblestone solution, designed for small and medium sized fashion and apparel companies.

Darren Moat explains: “Fashion businesses operating without the investment of an ERP system such as Dynamics from my experience utilise a number of disparate systems for business management. The usage of spreadsheets, databases, and multiple third-party systems to support the day-to-day business operations usually resort in adopting over engineered processes, whilst creating a number of issues due to the amount of time and effort required to manage and the data duplication that can occur. Integrating all this functionality into one solution using Dynamics has created efficiencies in our processes and make it easier to manage our business and data overall. Our key performance and operational data is now joined up in a common data model that we can trust, improving the administration and reporting of the system.”