CA S E STUDY

Leading Retailer
Leverages enVista’s
Single Unified
Commerce Platformand Microsoft
Dynamics 365 toOptimize Customer
Experience
American Freight Unifies
Commerce Across 300+ Stores

THE COMPANY
Since 1994, American Freight has been helping customers savemoney on quality furniture and mattresses. In February 2020,
American Freight combined with Sears Outlet, a leading national
discount retailer of home appliances, to create American Freight
Furniture Mattress Appliance. The enhanced company launched
in June 2020 and leverages the strong legacies of the foundingorganizations to provide a one-stop-shop for quality furniture,mattresses and appliances at everyday low prices.

THE OPPORTUNITY
American Freight experienced rapid growth, which caused it tohave more than 30 point of sale (POS) instances and 33 financial
instances across its 165+ stores. The company needed to move to asingle cloud-based (POS) and order management system (OMS) ona single data model, not only to simplify its technology footprint, butalso to enable enterprise inventory visibility, improve the customer
experience and drive sales.
American Freight’s many disparate POS systems made enterprisevisibility across the organization impossible. As a result, it wasunable to leverage inventory across its store network to gain
additional sales. In addition, sales associate training took weeks
due to a lack of standards, extensive sales order processes andantiquated technologies. At the time, the check-out processsometimes took over 15 minutes, reducing sales associate
productivity and eroding customer satisfaction.
American Freight was plagued by inaccurate reporting and lacked“one version of the truth” on details related to the customer,

inventory, order, item and payment due to manual businessintelligence tools and processes. These challenges were further
complicated with the acquisition of Sears Outlet stores by American
Freight, increasing the total number of stores impacted to over 300.

ENVISTA’S SOLUTION
Microsoft D365 Finance and Supply Chain Management andPower BI
enVista took a two-pronged approach to overcome American
Freight’s challenges. First, enVista and American Freight deployed
Microsoft Dynamics 365 to improve performance on the back end.
This included replacing previous business management softwareat the acquired Sears Outlet stores. As a Microsoft Gold Certified
Partner across all three Microsoft clouds with a team of retailindustry consultants averaging sixteen years of experience, enVista
was able to accelerate this aspect of the project. enVista also
introduced and implemented Power BI that aggregated data fromboth the legacy systems and new Dynamics 365 solution in order tomaintain their historical records.
enVista’s Unified Commerce Platform
On the front end, enVista and American Freight deployed enVista’s
Unified Commerce Platform, Enspire Commerce, leveraging
enVista’s proven omnichannel consulting experience. First, enVista
mapped out the optimal process flow to improve American
Freight’s customer experience. The team then implemented
enVista’s Unified Commerce Cloud Platform, including Pointof Sale, Order Management System and Product Information
Management, providing enterprise inventory visibility, standardizing
and optimizing sales order processes, and enabling “available

to promise” across stores. This reduced checkout time to lessthan three minutes, which dramatically improved the customer
experience.

THE RESULTS•Gained highly scalable solution for growth – 165+ stores in theinitial project live in a matter of months and, later, over 300
stores due to the acquisition of Sears Outlet stores•

Reduced maintenance costs by moving 30+ POS instances to one
cloud-based enVista solution•

Automated publishing of product information to stores andwebsiteTM•

Enabled store transfers, ship from store and pick up in store•

Improved commission reporting for sales associates•

Simplified returns processing•

Trained associates in a matter of hours with no manual required•

Improved reporting of store and associate performance with asingle database and business intelligence (BI) solution•

Decreased checkout times from 15 minutes to three minutes•

Obtained a single enterprise view of customer, inventory, order,
item, and payment, providing American Freight with the ability
to mitigate lost sales via real-time visibility into:•Total inventory and inventory locations•Optimal way to get the desired product to the customer

877-684-7700 or info@envistacorp.com