The use of cannabis for recreational purposes became legal across Canada on 17 October 2018. Due to the aggressive deadlines, the stores who were permitted to sell Cannabis were busy putting the last touches to open the doors on the big day. One such Canadian retailer who wanted to extend its retail footprint was the New Brunswick Liquor Corporation, operating as Alcool NB Liquor (ANBL). For over eight years, ANBL has been a long-standing Microsoft Customer and has standardized much of its business using Microsoft products and services, to run their traditional liquor business. Following the legalization of Cannabis, ANBL received the authority to become the sole seller in the province, including online and in store purchases under its subsidiary Cannabis NB.
Business Challenge : Since it was a newly formed marketplace, ANBL wanted to capture and understand their consumers to smartly give curated advice on the complete experience, while complying with legislation. Before launch, the cannabis industry had many unknown supply chain and retail requirements, and because ANBL had limited business to consumer experience, ANBL didn’t think they could extend current systems and infrastructure without putting both the beverage alcohol and the cannabis businesses at risk. Embracing cloud technologies, using a pre-integrated stack and not letting legacy systems or thinking slow them down was crucial.
Solution: ANBL was under strong pressure to meet the federal governments deadline to launch and support a complete new line of business in less than 6 months. The challenging timeline made it critical for them to choose the right platform that offered full breadth of capabilities and positioned their business for growth. To overcome these challenges, ANBL needed a content rich platform solution, as well as a robust commerce experience. ANBL assembled an internal team with subject matter experts from Microsoft implementation partner and gave team the task to implement solutions that could accelerate digital transformation across Sales, Marketing, Service, Finance, and Operations. When the ANBL team considered their positive experience with other MS Cloud solutions such as M365 and Azure, Microsoft Dynamics 365 was the obvious choice. In addition, they leveraged Microsoft ISV partner Episerver to deliver their commerce digital experiences.
Result: A full omni-channel business model was implemented in record time of 6 months. Beside launching a website, contact centre, a third-party logistics warehouse, home delivery and 20 brick-and-mortar stores on time, ANBL also took advantage of the platforms ability to ease multiple integrations to third-party systems such as payment solutions, 3-PLs etc. The integration with Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations and modern POS with Microsoft Azure also equipped ANBL with the digital ecosystem that was required to meet the customer needs putting in place what we call a true unified retail experience. “Our decision on a technical approach was not without risk. ANBL had started to adopt cloud technologies for non-critical systems such as data warehouses. This gave us the confidence to embrace Dynamics 365 and MPOS to hit the aggressive timelines, and in a new industry rife with unknowns. But the key to our success was the team. We picked the right vendors, created an internal team that could bring the best from our beverage alcohol business, and supplemented with skills where the cannabis business differed from beverage alcohol. Our launch was one of the smoothest I’ve seen. We had stabilised within a couple of days, and continue to enhance the customer offering “– said Dwayne Chase Director of Information Technology at Alcohol NB Liquor.
It’s no secret that digital transformation is radically changing the retail industry. Today, digital-centric business models are pushing the bar ever higher, to stay relevant and thrive in this evolving industry. This also highlight a shift in the Canadian retail and services sector, with challenger companies pioneering the adoption of new technologies and reaping the rewards of agility and collaboration to deliver better services for customers and colleagues. “Microsoft is fundamentally reimagining business applications and unleashing organizations. Microsoft Business Applications helps customers empower Employees, engage Customers, optimize Operations and transform products. What differentiates Microsoft’s approach to the cloud is our ability to deliver end-to-end support for data, infrastructure with Azure and provide business applications that work seamlessly together and with external applications” – said Sylvie Giguere – Director Sales, Public Sector
Team ANBL
