Gibson Brands streamlines its business and creates an immersive customer experience with Microsoft Dynamics 365

The goal? Simplification. Business processes were largely manual and inefficient because the legacy system lacked transparency, agility, and the ability to provide insight. Plans to open its flagship store, the Gibson Garage, at headquarters in Nashville, were underway when the COVID-19 health crisis delayed the launch. Since people could no longer go into a store to purchase, creating an immersive and customized buyer experience became an even bigger priority.

Revitalizing the technology platform

Also leading the push toward retail was the arrival of new leadership, including James “JC” Curleigh, President and CEO, in late 2018. Replacing antiquated systems and moving to a better platform was the first step. 

“Our business model changed when JC came along. Some of our processes needed upgrading. A lot of things were done manually. We needed to revitalize the business and our processes to make them more efficient and modern. The natural progression was to go digital,” explains Erick Peacon, Business Analyst at Gibson Brands.

“The problem,” says George Tarrant, Lead Developer at Gibson Brands, “can be described with one term: technical debt.” 

Gibson purchased Dynamics 365 Finance and Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management in April 2019, and Dynamics 365 Commerce in June 2020. They launched the Finance and Operations platform in July 2020.

Taking control in the transformation to retail

The decision to transform retail sales was motivated by a desire to connect with who Gibson’s customers really are and provide each with a customized experience. The shift to an omnichannel environment would let Gibson meet its customers everywhere they are—whether through retail, Direct to Consumer (D2C) sales, or a dealer network.

“Our legacy systems were unstable, unsustainable, and not optimized for the current ways of working,” explains Mallory McClain, Dealer Service Supervisor at Gibson Brands. “They weren’t talking to each other.”

“Dynamics 365,” she says, “has brought the company to the leading edge of technology” in terms of enterprise resource planning (ERP). “It’s stepped up our game and unlocked so many possibilities that we’re just scratching the surface. We’re continually going through, refining processes, and unlocking different aspects of the ERP to really figure out what works for us in a system.”

Josh Dierman, Acoustic Production Scheduler at Gibson Brands, says “Even within our own system we’d become very siloed, so reporting was being done very differently in one facility than it was in another. There wasn’t a holistic view of really anything that was going on in our prior state.”

Regarding the previous system, Tarrant says, “It was so heavily customized and there were so many modifications put into it that it couldn’t be updated without worrying about everything breaking. It was constant maintenance and fixes, workaround upon workaround, until we finally decided to go with something that was actually a world-class system, and here we are.”

Prior to the change in leadership, many people across the company had their own view of how things should be done. As Cheryl Morgan, Business Analyst at Gibson Brands, explains, “IT was spread really thin because they wanted to help everybody but didn’t have the bandwidth. In the past several months, leadership has come together to start prioritizing projects.”

McClain says, “A lot of SMEs have gone into the test environment. We’ve got things that we want to develop, processes that we need to go into the system, see what tools are available, and figure out what the best practices are for implementing. We’ve got the foundation laid with the system and now we’re making those tweaks to really get down into the efficiency gains and those granular controls.”

“And making it work for Gibson,” adds Morgan.

Working better together with Microsoft Teams

Using Dynamics 365 led to a significant improvement in communications and cross-functional collaboration through Microsoft Teams. “When we decided to go with Dynamics 365 and implement across the business,” says Morgan, “we were forced to start working together as a collaborative team. We’ve all learned so much about how production works, how that affects sales … and how that affects our customers.”

Adds McClain, “In my 14 years with Gibson I don’t think I spent as much time with Josh or any of the guys in production as I did during the implementation period. Getting to know those guys and seeing how all the pieces come together to make the business work was really enlightening and inspiring.”

Morgan emphasizes that “Dynamics 365 creates the accountability between the different business units. Everybody is having to work together. It’s been a real eye-opener.”

Gibson employees continue to work remotely and collaborate through Teams. “Screen sharing is huge,” says Dierman. “What used to be a sequence of 10-15 emails over an entire morning trying to answer a question for someone is now a five-minute Teams call.”

“It’s really helped us on a collaboration level, from doing trainings, sharing screens, and working the training documentations through Task Recorder,” says McClain. “Teams has been indispensable.”

“On top of that,” says Morgan, “we would not have made it through COVID-19 had this not been a cloud-based environment. Everything I do is Dynamics 365 and Teams and Outlook, which has been pivotal.”

Introducing Nashville’s premier Gibson entertainment experience

The company’s vision of creating digitally fueled in-store experiences for its customers led to the birth of the Gibson Garage, a new entertainment and retail outlet located at the company’s headquarters in downtown Nashville.

Running on the Dynamics platform, the Gibson Garage is a place for customers to see the guitar they’re buying, hear somebody play it—and, from a B2B perspective, to show how to make retail a really great experience. “On the dealer-facing side,” says Peacon, “we want to be able to help our dealers sell.”

“Part of that,” adds McClain, “is really just elevating our level of service to dealers. To present a retail experience that they can build on, from a presentation and a service standpoint. It’s all about working together, both on our D2C-facing side as well as with our dealer base.”

All of this is based on production, according to Dierman. “Now that we’re operating as a more unified group our product lines align better across our entire enterprise. In a prior state, it was very difficult for a dealer to know what was coming from whom and when. Now there’s a lot more structure and that allows for a much clearer dealer and consumer experience.”

Following the successful launch of the flagship store, Gibson is now looking ahead to using the Dynamics 365 Commerce platform, not just for D2C. “The Garage is using the retail and commerce module from Dynamics 365 as the point of sale (POS) system. We’re starting to leverage the commerce side of it and are going to move the backend of our websites to the Commerce engine,” says Tarrant. “We’re really starting the process of utilizing the Commerce portion of it and changing the dynamic of our company.”

Reaching every stage and every player

“Dynamics 365,” says Peacon, “is giving us the ability to reach all demographics, whether through ecommerce or retail or helping our manufacturing and our dealers get product out there.”

With so many people at home during COVID-19, Gibson’s sales took off. According to McClain, with the system used before the move to Dynamics 365, “there would have been no way to keep up with the demand and the number of orders.”

“It hasn’t been an easy road, but to come from where we were to where we are now is just amazing,” concludes McClain. “The melody line was there, we’re just filling in the verses now … and figuring out where to go forward with that to complete the whole composition.”