Standing up retail operations
in a new market.

Floward sells and delivers flowers, cakes and gifts on a same-day basis across the Gulf and the UK. It is not a florist with a website — it runs its own fulfilment hubs, its own delivery fleet and its own retail stores, which makes it an operations business as much as an e-commerce one.

The company has raised roughly $190 million, including a $156 million pre-IPO round, and has been expanding market by market. That growth profile is what put the ERP work on the critical path: every new country means new stores, new stock, new tax treatment and new reporting, and none of it can be run out of spreadsheets.

Entering a new market meant standing up a full retail operation inside Dynamics 365 from nothing — and doing it on the timeline of a store opening, which does not move because a configuration is unfinished.

Alongside that, two operational processes were consuming staff time daily. Purchase orders were being raised by hand in response to sales orders. Payments taken through a third-party platform were not landing in the ERP without intervention. Both scaled linearly with order volume, which is precisely the wrong shape for a company growing this fast.

• R1Retail point of sale configured and live across new stores, in step with opening dates
• R2Purchase ordering triggered automatically from sales demand rather than raised manually
• R3Sales order payments from an external platform reconciled into the ERP without manual entry
• R4Retail reporting the finance team could actually use, in the formats they already worked in
• R5Resource and role assignment handled by the system as headcount grew

We led the retail rollout as a configuration-and-development programme rather than a pure install — the standard product covers most of a retail operation, but never the parts specific to how a business actually trades.

Where the effort actually went: not the modules themselves, but the store-level configuration matrix — assortments, registers, receipts, devices — multiplied across every new location, plus the two automations that removed recurring manual work from the finance and procurement teams.

• 01Retail POS rollout. Store setup, assortment management, receipt formats, register and device configuration for each new location in the new market.
• 02Purchase order automation. Purchase orders generated automatically from sales orders, removing a manual step that grew with every order.
• 03Payment integration. Sales order payments taken in a third-party application integrated into Dynamics 365 so finance worked from one ledger.
• 04Resource role automation. Role assignment across the platform automated rather than administered by hand.
• 05Custom retail reporting. SSRS reports built for retail operations and finance, in the shapes those teams already used.