Kent Outdoors streamlines e-commerce with Dynamics 365

A constantly evolving industry and a growing customer base spurred Kent to re-evaluate their customer reach. Knowing their demographic was growing in both numbers and interests, the company understood that charting a new, agile path was the way forward to keep outdoor adventurers engaged in their passions. According to the Outdoor Industry Association, more adults than ever are taking up outdoor activities for the first time, thanks in large part to the COVID-19 pandemic. The NPD Group, a global market information company, identified the fastest-growing outdoor specialty category in 2020 as water sports, up 21%. To catch the wave of rising demand, Kent Outdoors chose to optimize e-commerce capabilities using Microsoft Dynamics 365.

Shifting demand

In 2020, Kent experienced a dramatic surge in orders as more people headed outdoors for recreation. The company typically distributed their products to retailers, but physical store closures disrupted many of Kent’s distribution channels. With more customers shopping and fewer stores open, Kent’s ability to sell directly to consumers became more critical than ever.

But Kent’s distribution model was based on wholesale quantities shipped by the truckload, less time-sensitive than a typical consumer order. That changed almost overnight. Focusing on direct-to-consumer sales required a swift transition to more numerous but smaller orders, small parcel shipping, and highly time-sensitive order-to-delivery times. The capacity challenges were daunting. Single-shipment orders increased from 1,000 to 88,000 in just three years.

Business-to-business (B2B) customer expectations were changing, too. Kent Outdoors wanted to provide the same easy, streamlined digital ordering experience for its business customers. But with 11 distinct e-commerce sites operating on different platforms like Shopify and Abode Commerce (formerly Magento), Kent couldn’t deliver the customer experience they wanted to. 

Kent was a long-time Microsoft customer, already relying heavily on Office 365 applications and Dynamics 365 Finance and Supply Chain Management for distribution, warehouse management, sales, and financials. Adding Dynamics 365 Commerce allowed Kent’s brands to enjoy the benefits of an end-to-end fully integrated environment. Further, Dynamics 365 unified B2B and B2C (business to consumer) e-commerce on a single platform, eliminating the need to manage multiple storefronts and integrations.

“We believe that having one source of truth is vitally important so that employees and customers can trust the information,” says Rhett Thompson, Kent’s IT Corporate Director. “We chose Dynamics 365 Commerce so that we can maintain accurate data across the company and avoid duplicating any pricing or inventory levels.” 

Immediate impacts

Since adopting Dynamics 365 Commerce, Kent has significantly increased business agility in retail, fulfillment, and distribution processes. Employees gain better planning, inventory, and fulfillment visibility and can take care of orders faster. And because Dynamics 365 enables Kent to fulfill orders quickly and accurately, the company has reduced their customer service workload. Using Dynamics 365 Commerce to unite their B2B and B2C systems into a single platform simplifies Kent’s overall technology environment, saving time for both customers and employees.

Expanding B2C e-commerce: Kent’s first B2C e-commerce deployment was with the world’s most recognized brand in watersports, O’Brien. Kent structured O’Brien products on their site according to availability, sparing customers the disappointment of picking a product only to find out later that it was out of stock or on backorder. Availability means higher sales—and, following their implementation of Dynamics 365, Kent Outdoors experienced a record year.

Transforming B2B selling: Kent was careful to keep improvements to their traditional B2B model apace with their increasing B2C focus. Historically, to place an order, a B2B customer would send Kent a spreadsheet or email, then a sales rep would have to import the document or manually enter the order into a separate system. This was time-consuming and cumbersome for staff, and customers had no real-time visibility into inventory. Now with Dynamics 365, B2B customers enjoy a streamlined experience, ordering directly from the brand’s e-commerce site where they have full visibility into product images, prices, and accurate inventory. “B2B buying has changed, and distributors want to be able to place orders themselves, which means we receive orders more quickly and reduce the burden on sales staff,” says Thompson.

E-commerce from the back office

For customers, there isn’t a visible difference in order entry between Dynamics 365 e-commerce, Shopify, Adobe Commerce, or any of the other applications Kent uses. But with Dynamics 365 from end to end, the back-office efficiencies are substantial. In the past, back-office staff endured a laborious manual process to extract information from orders submitted through ancillary e-commerce platforms and import it into Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management, where the orders could be released to the warehouse for fulfillment. Invoices were posted after the orders were shipped. The team had to download a file of credit card payments from the bank, then manually review and match each one to the orders that were processed the previous day. With Dynamics 365 end-to-end, a formerly manual-intensive process is now an automated workflow. Credit is checked before the order is submitted, orders flow through to the warehouse, transactions settle themselves, and best of all, no one has to match anything. 

Thompson says the pricing feature in Dynamics 365 is powerful and saves the company hours through simplified processes. “We no longer have to maintain separate tables for separate pricing,” he says. “Just our regular trade agreements work, we don’t have to populate extra data. People often ended up maintaining separate pricing for sites and had to populate CSV files. This is all automatic now. Customers log in and the pricing specific to them is there. The accuracy of the pricing was also key for us, and it’s a standard byproduct of the design.”

For Kent, whose focus is on selling available inventory to their B2C customers, the impact is enormous. Visibility into inventory and across the supply chain enables them to plan better, offering the right product incentive to increase sales, as well as organizing pricing in groups to show availability at many levels. The IT department has also gained back a lot of time now that they no longer have to update the site with the latest inventory and pricing. Instead, employees are empowered to make those changes themselves. “The efficiencies gained through the standardization and integration are significant, it simplifies users' lives tremendously,” says Thompson.

Increased visibility with the Microsoft ecosystem

Kent Outdoors uses Microsoft Azure Data Lake Storage for data storage and analytics and Power BI for reporting. Kent has developed more than 160 Power BI reports. “We use Power BI reports extensively, and Dynamics 365 is even more powerful for us because of how well it works with Power BI,” says Thompson.  

With data and reporting readily available, company leaders gain insight into the business to make informed decisions. According to Thompson, Kent executives check Power BI first thing in the morning, monitoring the business daily, instead of having to wait a week to be able to run a report as in the old system. “We have a lot of data, and with Power BI, we can finally distill that data into information that everyone trusts and understands,” he says. “Power BI and Dynamics 365 help drive every decision that our company makes.”

Faster acquisition integration

The efficiency of Dynamics 365 means Kent has a template that reduces implementation effort at newly acquired companies by 75%. Even with the complexities of their business, they are rolling out new companies in a quarter of the time it took before Dynamics 365. Speed isn’t the only benefit of the ease and flexibility of Dynamics. Kent can do in-house implementation, further reducing costs on vendors and partners.

Providing the best customer experience

Ultimately, Kent Outdoors made changes to their business and technology because they want to understand customer needs and provide the best shopping experience possible. Not only is the company seamlessly meeting increased demand, but they also now offer rich digital experiences, improved UI, and product recommendations. “The UI changes we’ve made through Dynamics 365 represent a tremendous improvement over our legacy UI,” says Thompson.

Thompson notes that these transformations are still new, but he sees a lot of potential for unprecedented customer satisfaction and continued rapid business growth.

Looking ahead

Kent Outdoors looks forward to leveraging their strong relationship with Microsoft as they continue to grow and add to the thousands of products, they offer customers. The long-term strategy includes continued innovation to their customer experience through Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) and QR codes to deepen insights into consumer demands and enhance customer satisfaction.