Fashion retailer Khaadi reinvents daily operations with Microsoft Power Apps

Founded in 1998, Khaadi is Pakistan’s premier fashion retailer with more than 70 physical stores across Pakistan, the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) and the United Kingdom, as well as online stores in more than 12 countries. “Innovation is the secret to our success and is essential to everything we do,” shares Shamoon Sultan, CEO and Founder of Khaadi. This attitude has not only shaped Khaadi’s approach to apparel design, but has seen the business through considerable challenges.

A rapid transition to omnichannel

“With COVID-19 quarantine measures, stores were not operational. We could only run the business online,” begins Muhammad Rehan Qadri, Chief Information Officer at Khaadi. “To do that effectively, we needed omnichannel sales capabilities, meaning leveraging one inventory across the business and using our stores as fulfillment hubs.”

A long-time user of Microsoft technology, Qadri chose Power Apps to build the brand’s integrated sales services. He says, “We were able to draw up a blueprint for omnichannel sales rapidly and implemented a complete enterprise-level scenario in just in one weekend. Thanks to our integrated omnichannel app which we built in-house, IT was able to transform the dynamics of our business within just a week’s time, making Khaadi a truly omnichannel enabled retailer. From there, it was only a matter of three months before we scaled the roll out ten times with help of Dynamics 365 Commerce Distributed Order Management (DOM). It’s incredible because we know of some similar retail businesses who started their omnichannel journey 14 to 15 months back but have not yet implemented similar capabilities.”

Developed using Power Apps, Power Automate, Office 365 tools and Dynamics 365 Finance, Supply Chain and Commerce, Khaadi’s Omni Plus solution effectively leverages company-wide data for a streamlined omnichannel experience. The result: a dramatically improved range of apparel choices for customers around the globe and the realization of considerable business synergies. “The solution helped to significantly reduce our overall order fulfillment lead time, boost inventory turnover, and deliver a double-digit reduction in logistics cost,” explains Ayaz Abdulla, Chief Strategy and E-Commerce Officer at Khaadi. He says, “I was particularly impressed with the ease of use and quick, remote deployment of the app to a nationwide network of retail teams—truly remarkable.”

End-to-end business visibility

Having seen the business-boosting benefits of using Power Apps for online sales, Khaadi also turned to Microsoft technology to ensure profitability when brick-and-mortar stores reopened after the COVID-19 lockdown. “Our store managers work as ‘CEOs’ of our stores, meaning that they have to manage profitability end-to-end. We needed to give them a complete application providing total visibility of the whole business across sales, expenses, footfall, conversion, and other key ratios,” shares Qadri.

To enable the store managers’ success, Khaadi developed its Store Plus solution using Power Apps, Power BI, Azure SQL and Dynamics 365 Finance, Supply Chain and Commerce. The solution provides managers with critical store-level metrics in real-time, with operational and financial data continually updated. This key information enables managers to react nimbly to business needs, and develop deep insight into how different strategies affect store performance.

Plus, thanks to Khaadi’s Voice of the Customer solution—a survey system also developed on Power Apps—the company is able to receive key feedback from customers. It helps the company better understand their needs, enhance the shopping experience, and address any product and quality issues. This not only improves the customers’ experience at every stage of the sales journey, but gives them a powerful way to make their needs and preferences known.

Collaboration and opportunity

Moving forward, Khaadi is excited about further digital opportunities to enhance customer experience or improve daily operations for staff. Its plans include developing a service bot using Power Virtual Agent. “With any new service that comes out, we hold discussions of use cases. We think about how we can capitalize on those innovations to take our digital transformation journey forward with Microsoft,” Qadri concludes.