When Children’s Place President and CEO Jane Elfers joined the company in 2010, technology upgrades were desperately needed to increase system efficiency and enhance customer engagement and the overall customer experience.
During the company’s fiscal fourth-quarter earnings call earlier this month, Elfers noted the enormous strides the company has made since then on the technology front.
“As most of you know when I joined TCP in 2010, the systems had not been addressed or upgraded in more than two decades,” Elfers said, according to Seeking Alpha. “We were willfully behind the competition and the task of replacing every major system in the company, while also effecting a company-wide transformation, was a big challenge. However, our team has done a remarkable job modernizing our systems over the past three years. We have made significant investments in our system and have delivered all of our major implementations on-schedule and on-budget.”
Last year, the company implemented a state-of-the-art inventory allocation and replenishment tool for back-to-school 2015, which significantly improved its inventory management capability.
“We began implementation on a mark-down optimization tool for the plan to go live in the second half of this year,” Elfers said. “We implemented sophisticated technologies to further enable our omnichannel capabilities allowing us to focus on customer segmentation to increase acquisition retention and engagement. We implemented a new distributed order management system in Q3, which will enable us to begin to unlock cross-channel fulfillment capabilities in the second half of 2016. We enhanced our digital capabilities, including organic search and dynamic lifecycle email campaigns triggered by individual behavior, and we launched e-receipts in June, which enabled additional customer contact opportunity adding 1.2 million new emails to our database.”
Although 2015 marked the end of the third quarter of the company’s five-year systems implementation plan, “we are only at the beginning of a long runway of improved operating results enabled by the enhanced technologies,” Elfers said.
What’s more, Elfers talked proudly about the company’s impressive management team.
“Talent is the halo that ultimately defines our success,” she said. “Our management team is the reason for our success. Over the past five years, we have built a best-in-class management team and those of you who have followed us for the past several years have seen firsthand the extensive talent upgrade that had taken place throughout our company. This world-class management team is a significant competitive advantage for the Children’s Place and it is their commitment to deliver on our longstanding strategic growth plan that sets them apart. It is so rare in retailing to effect a successful turnaround, particularly of this magnitude, and this team deserves all the credit.”