Case Study: How A Women Apparel Brand In India Utilised AI

TCNS Clothing is a leading name in women’s apparels in India with fashion brands, including W, Wishful, Aurelia, and Elleven. The company designs, manufactures, markets, and retails branded clothing targeting the upwardly mobile Indian women.

With a massive network of distribution channels, including 3,500+ offline points of sales, brand websites and marketplaces across the country, the company was all over the map.

TCNS was in dire need of a solid platform to solve challenges like shipment tracking and centralised inventory management. The company struggled with returns, refund processing, and warehouse operations. The lower customer satisfaction rate, due to its inability to handle customer complaints in real-time, further compounded the woes.

To address the challenges, TCNS turned to Unicommerce, a SaaS-based e-commerce focused supply-chain platform. Unicommerce provides AI-powered eCommerce solution to 100+ marketplaces, logistics providers, ERPs/Point of sales companies, including Amazon, Flipkart, Myntra, Shopify, Magento, Delhivery, FedEx, Blue Dart, DTDC, SAP, Oracle, Tally, Microsoft Dynamics Navision, Shadowfax etc. 

Analytics India Magazine spoke with Saurabh Bansal, the Head of Digital at TCNS Clothing and Kapil Makhija, CEO, Unicommerce, to understand the nuts and bolts of their partnership.

The evolving situation post lockdown further emphasised the need for a robust multichannel inventory management system, said Bansal.

How Unicommerce Simplifies The Process

As per Makhija, “Warehouse is a backbone of any business, and thus to automate all major functions of the TCNS warehouse, Unicommerce enabled the company with AI-powered technology solutions to help them manage their eCommerce operations easily and improve business productivity.” 

Unicommerce designed an order fulfilment and inventory management solution to manage multiple sales channels on a single platform. With the AI and ML implemented in a warehouse management solution that integrates offline store, online sale channels and marketplace, TCNS was able to manage all orders, and inventory through a single platform, said Makhija.

The solution comes with complete visibility of the product, and it intelligently allocates the right store to fulfil the demand in the shortest time accounting for multiple factors such as store location, work timings, capacity etc. “Similarly, our solution also enables TCNS to find the best logistic partner based on serviceability and other factors,” said Makhija.

“Unicommerce comes pre-integrated with all the leading marketplaces, which made it easier for us to sell across all leading eCommerce channels,” said Bansal.

The brand could track reverse pick-ups, returns, and cancellations status in real-time, enabling seamless customer refunds management. This helped the company increase customer satisfaction, lower return rate and improve business performance by reducing operations cost. The AI-powered platform also offers precise reports and a dashboard to analyse performance across services and prioritise workflows.

The solution also comes with a centralised inventory database across multiple warehouses and stores, with full visibility of stock movement and order management solutions to enable quick order processing by integrating all sales channels into one platform. The AI-powered supply chain automation platform intelligently allocates orders to the right stocking point and offers complete inventory visibility across channels.

“The deployment was smooth, and so far, we have not faced any challenges,” said Bansal. “The focus is on keeping the database updated regularly, communicate with the key stakeholders and follow up on a real-time basis.”

Unicommerce understands the dynamism required in a warehouse solution, where virtual and physical marketplaces overlap. The robust backend allows the system to keep track of customers’ interest and optimise product recommendations.

Benefits

With Unicommerce’s innovative AI-powered solution, TCNS Clothing managed its live catalogue size of over 150K+ items, sold across 18 sales channels with ~1.5 lakh dispatches per month, all from a single platform. The retailer also centralised 400K inventory count across multiple sales channels through Unicommerce, which helped them achieve 9X growth in sales in just two years.

“Unicommerce allowed the client to have complete visibility for reverse pick-ups status, which helped them to manage customer refunds, enhancing their productivity while reducing the cost of operations and logistics,” concluded Makhija.