Columbus Consulting advises on Malin+Goetz's digital transformation
Columbus Consulting, a retail consulting firm, recently supported Malin+Goetz, a global personal care brand, with the upgrading of its core processes.
Founded in New York in 2004, Malin+Goetz has expanded its hair and skincare product line to more than 100 SKUs and its physical store footprint to 17 stores across the US, UK, and Hong Kong. The brand sells to consumers directly and distributes to partners in wholesale clubs, hotels, airlines, and gyms.
The firm’s expansion, however, rendered its existing technical system and processes a hindrance to future growth. Malin+Goetz was bringing in large amounts of data that team members still had to work with manually across Excel spreadsheets.
“We had outgrown our systems and processes, and we were spending considerable time on the manual processes of controlling the moving parts,” said Susan Gould, vice president supply chain and operations, Malin+Goetz.
As such, the company enlisted Columbus Consulting to help it select and implement new enterprise resource planning (ERP), point-of-sale (POS), and inventory management systems. Since the company did not have an existing IT infrastructure, a cloud-based system was the best option for starting fresh.
Columbus helped Malin+Goetz select Microsoft Business Central as the ERP system, the Netstock add-in for inventory planning and management, and Square for POS. Columbus also collaborated with a third-party implementation team for the configuration and installation of the systems.
The upgraded core processes will enable Malin+Goetz to offer new customer benefits like seamless buy online, pickup in-store (Bopis) options and a unified gift card program. The retailer will also leverage better reporting systems to help it make more informed business decisions.
“With the re-platforming complete, MALIN+GOETZ is well-positioned to grow for the next five to 10 years,” said Richard von Hirschberg, partner, Columbus Consulting. “Internal processes are already more efficient and transparency across the entire supply chain has been restored."
Based in Columbus, OH, the consulting firm has worked with more than 250 leading companies in the consumer and retail space, including Starbucks, Target, Walmart, and Nike. The firm advises clients on business strategy and transformation initiatives across commerce, merchandising, inventory management, sourcing, operations, data & analytics, information technology, and people & organization.
Columbus Consulting was founded in 2001 and has more than 90 employees, according to LinkedIn.
