Retail · Pune, India · 2024
14 stores, one inventory: POS and ERP integration for a Pune retail chain
A well loved Pune retail chain had fourteen stores, a warehouse, an ERP, a web store and four different answers to the question "do we have it?". We connected them without replacing the systems the business runs on, so every till, shelf and product page now works from the same stock.
- Client
- A multi-store retail chain in Pune
- Market
- India
- Engagement
- Integration build, then Care & Grow plan
- Timeline
- 20 weeks, store by store
- In care since
- 2024
- Platforms
- Web store, Android tablets, Store POS
- Capabilities
- IntegrationsCommerceCloud and Hosting
14
stores on one inventory
Every 5 min
stock synced across tills, ERP, warehouse and web store
31%
fewer stock-outs
First festival season after go-live, against the same season a year earlier
The context
A chain that grew one store at a time.
Our client is a family-owned retailer that has sold homeware, kitchenware and gifts in Pune for more than two decades. It grew the way good local businesses do: one store, then another, until there were fourteen across Pune and Pimpri-Chinchwad, supplied from a central warehouse near Chakan and, more recently, a web store.
Each store billed customers on its own point of sale. The ERP handled items, purchasing, accounts and GST, and heard from the stores once a night. The web store was updated from a spreadsheet twice a week. Every system was sensible on its own. Together they rarely agreed.
The challenge
Four answers to one simple question.
Store staff could not see what the branch down the road had, so they phoned around or asked in a managers' WhatsApp group called "Stock?", which by Diwali was busier than some of the tills. The web store sold products that had gone hours earlier, and the team spent evenings apologising and refunding. The purchase team reordered from yesterday's numbers.
Replacing the POS or the ERP was never on the table. Staff knew them, the accountants trusted them, and a failed migration in the run up to festival season could cost the year. The chain needed its existing systems to talk to each other reliably, without a store ever being unable to bill a customer.
Our approach
Connect what works. Replace nothing that does.
Suraj Pawar led the account. We built a stock service in the cloud that sits between the tills, the ERP, the warehouse and the web store. Each system keeps doing its own job. The service listens to all of them, keeps one version of the truth and tells everyone else what changed. The rollout followed the Ampersand Method, with people from the shop floor in the room at every phase.
- 01
Listen & Learn
Two days in three stores and a morning at the warehouse, watching how stock really moves: sales, returns, transfers in the delivery van, damaged goods set aside behind the counter.
- 02
Map & Measure
We mapped every record that had to move, from items and prices to sales, transfers and purchase orders, and agreed which system owns each one, so no number ever has two masters.
- 03
Sketch & Shape
An event-based design with a five minute sync cycle, an offline queue at every till and simple rules for conflicts. Store staff tried the tablet screens as paper prototypes before we wrote a line of code.
- 04
Build & Break
We replayed a year of real sales through the service at ten times normal speed. Then, with the owners' blessing, we cut the internet to a pilot store on a busy Saturday to prove the tills kept billing and caught up afterwards.
- 05
Launch & Land
Two pilot stores first, then the other twelve in three waves over three weeks, each on a quiet weekday morning with our engineers on site and a rollback plan nobody needed.
- 06
Care & Grow
Monitoring and alerts on every sync, a monthly stock accuracy review with the operations team, and a roadmap for what the new data makes possible.
What we built
One stock service, four systems in agreement.
The chain's POS and ERP stayed exactly where they were. What changed is everything in between, plus a few tools for the people on the shop floor.
The stock service
A cloud service in the AWS Mumbai region that receives every sale, return, transfer and delivery, and publishes one stock figure for every item in every location.
- Stock synced every 5 minutes across all channels
- Events that can never be counted twice
- A full audit trail for every movement
- A health dashboard and alerts
POS integration
Connectors for the stores' existing point of sale software, with a local queue so a till keeps billing when the internet drops and catches up when it returns.
- Sales and returns sent as they happen
- An offline queue at every till
- Price and promotion changes pushed to stores
ERP integration
Two-way sync with the ERP, which remains the owner of items, costs, purchasing and GST accounting.
- Item and price master from the ERP
- Stock movements back to the ERP for the accounts
- Purchase orders raised from reorder alerts
A web store that knows the shelves
The Shopify web store now sells from live stock with a safety buffer for each item, and offers click and collect from the nearest store that has it.
- Stock by store on every product page
- Click and collect from any of the 14 stores
- Safety buffers that stop overselling
A tablet for every store
A simple Android app for store staff to look up stock across the chain, request a transfer and count shelves with a barcode scan.
- Stock in every store in two taps
- Transfer requests the warehouse can batch
- Cycle counts by barcode
Reorder and rebalancing
Reports that show the purchase team what to reorder, and the operations team what to move between stores, before anyone runs out.
- Daily reorder suggestions
- Fast and slow movers by store
- A festival season planning view
The outcome
The tills, the warehouse and the website finally agree.
All 14 stores now work from one inventory, with stock synced every 5 minutes across the tills, the ERP, the warehouse and the web store. A customer who finds an item online can walk into the store that has it, and a store that has run out can see who has it and ask for it in two taps.
Across the first festival season after go-live, stock-outs fell by 31% against the same season a year earlier. Online orders for items that were no longer on the shelf all but disappeared, and so did the evenings spent apologising for them.
This is what ERP, CRM and POS integration should feel like from the shop floor: nobody talks about the systems any more. The "Stock?" group still exists. These days it is mostly birthday wishes.
Our stores, warehouse and website finally agree on what is in stock. That sounds simple. It took a team that understood both the tills and the cloud.
Care & Grow
Two festival seasons, no surprises.
In our care since 2024
The chain has been on a Care & Grow plan since go-live. Every sync is monitored, and the operations team gets an alert when a store has been quiet for longer than it should, which usually means a router that needs switching back on. Two festival seasons have come and gone without a sync incident that reached a customer.
Since launch we have added supplier delivery booking at the warehouse, moved reorder suggestions from weekly to daily and begun a loyalty programme that recognises customers the same way in store and online, because for the first time the data is good enough to support one. The service runs on our cloud and hosting platform, looked after by the same team that built it.
Who worked on it
- Partner, engineering and delivery
- Solutions architect
- Two integration engineers
- Product designer
- Frontend engineer
- Android engineer
- QA engineer
- DevOps engineer
Notes for retailers connecting POS, ERP and ecommerce
Decide who owns each number
Before any code, agree which system is the master for items, prices, costs and stock. Most failed integrations are two systems quietly overwriting each other. Ours had a one page table, signed by operations and finance, and we referred to it every week.
Design for the internet going down
A store’s connection will drop, usually on the busiest afternoon. The till must keep billing, queue what it sold and catch up without double counting. Test it by actually pulling the plug.
Five minutes is usually enough
Real time sounds better than it is. A five minute cycle, with safety buffers on the web store, gave this chain accurate stock at a fraction of the cost and complexity of instant sync. The same retained core thinking runs through our work for the NABARD Employees’ Co-operative Credit Society.
Credits
D&C Studios designed and built the stock service, the POS and ERP connectors, the web store changes and the store tablet app, rolled them out and runs the Care & Grow plan. The chain’s POS and ERP vendors kept their systems exactly as they were and helped with access and testing. Figures come from the chain’s own stock and sales reports.
Why this client is not named
The chain prefers not to be named, so it is described by type and every screen is recreated with fictional products and stores.
Running more than one system that should agree? Tell us what they are.
Stack and tools
- Node.js
- TypeScript
- PostgreSQL
- Redis queues
- AWS Mumbai region
- Shopify
- Kotlin for Android
- Existing POS and ERP, retained