Sally Beauty Holdings’ next steps revealed its resourcefulness and agility. The business couldn’t fulfill orders on a timely basis from its distribution centers, so it found an alternative way.
“We said, ‘We’ve got a lot of inventory sitting in our Sally Beauty stores in the US. Why don’t we just roll out ship from store? This would allow us to extend our product assortment while our suppliers are not fully operational. It would also give our store associates jobs and our customers a chance to come shop us,’” Taylor explains.
Within three weeks, the company enabled 2,700 of its 3,300 US retail stores to function as fulfillment centers. Essentially adding thousands of new shipping nodes to its US network, the company significantly increased customer satisfaction and sales.
Taylor describes the in-store execution of new SFS capabilities, including establishing and training new business rules for order distribution and transportation, as a complicated process. Capitalizing on its IBM Sterling Order Management solution, the team rapidly got the work done.
“It was super stressful, but that’s what the IBM application is built for, to understand where the demand is, where the inventory is and how to best get it to consumers. It is an incredibly strong application that can be flexibly configured to do what we need it to do,” she says.
The team also closely worked with IBM and Perficient during the implementation, including applying agile delivery methods to integrate the application into the company’s point-of-sale system. “I have to give all the credit in the world to the IBM support team and to our Perficient team for working closely with our Sally Beauty teams to deploy a consolidated and comprehensive solution,” Taylor says.
For instance, shortly after going live, the SFS application performance dipped because of the huge transaction volumes. “We use a software-as-a-service (SaaS) delivery model, and outside of this moment we’ve never had any issue as it relates to scalability and performance,” says Taylor. “But when you scale your e-commerce operations like we did, you’re going to have a little bit of a challenge. We immediately collaborated with IBM and Perficient to resize our cloud capabilities, and within hours we were back up and running. We’ve never had a performance issue since.”
Learn how to build smarter supply chains
Fast to enable SFS capabilities, Sally Beauty Holdings attracted new B2C customers during the pandemic’s early months in North America. However, supply chain disruptions had fragmented in-store inventories, so customers often received split order shipments. To improve the brand experience and minimize its shipping costs, the company gradually reduced the number of stores offering a SFS option from 2,700 to 245 stores. The business continues to optimize the network, helping streamline inventory allocation.
In April 2020, as some stores began safely opening back up, Sally Beauty Holdings also quickly piloted and then rolled out curbside pickup and buy online pickup in store (BOPIS) capabilities for most Sally Beauty Supply stores in the US and Canada. This model further reduced order splitting and shipping costs, while helping new customers become more familiar with store locations and product assortments.
More than a year after the pandemic began, the digital transformation at Sally Beauty Holdings continues. In the summer of 2021, the company introduced BOPIS options for cosmoprofbeauty.com. It is also in the process of deploying same-day, two-hour delivery for sallybeauty.com, and same day, three-hour delivery for cosmoprofbeauty.com.
“We remain focused on having inventory in the right place at the right time, so customers have excellent experiences, and we optimize costs,” says Taylor.