Hibbett Moves to The Cloud with A Modernized ERP System To Propel the Brand into Their Next Era
THE HIBBETT STORY
Hibbett, headquartered in Birmingham, Alabama, is a leading athletic-inspired fashion retailer with more than 1,000 specialty stores, located in 36 states nationwide. Marking its 80th anniversary in 2025, Hibbett continues to build on a legacy of convenient locations providing personalized customer service and bringing access to premium product, coveted footwear and apparel from top brands like Nike, Jordan, adidas and New Balance in underserved communities. As a Unified Commerce Retailer, Hibbett (owned by JD Sports Fashion plc.) offers consumers channel flexibility to browse styles, find new releases, shop Toe-2-Head fits and make/return purchases in store and online.
EVOLUTION AND TRANSFORMATION
Like all brand growth stories, Hibbett has remained relevant by adapting to market and consumer needs, constantly reinventing themselves across channels and platforms. From modernizing their POS systems to the creation of innovative loyalty programs and customer-focused merchandising, Hibbett set its sights on addressing their multifaceted ERP system.
The company secured Oracle as the platform to operate their merchandising, assortment planning, replenishment, allocations, price optimization, and enterprise planning. In addition, they updated their omnichannel solutions from on-premises to the cloud, which included Oracle’s Xstore Point of Service (POS), Customer Engagement and Order Orchestration applications.
ACQUISITION AND SCALE
Hibbett’s legacy and disparate systems were limiting growth and slowing innovation, prompting the need for a seamless end-to-end solution across vendor processes, inventory visibility, and operations. As the in-house team undertook a major shift to Oracle Cloud and replaced aging merchandising systems, the effort strained internal resources and ultimately required additional external support and leadership.
According to Bill Quinn, CIO at Hibbett, “Our organization knew that we needed to continue our transformation journey and understood the risks of trying to manage such a project using only in house resources. We worked with Columbus Consulting on other projects and knew that they were up for the task and would help us accomplish what was needed.”
WHAT WAS AT STAKE – CORE BUSINESS GOALS
Hibbett began the project with internal teams, but the ambitious scope and timeline demanded specialized, dedicated expertise to manage risks, maintain uninterrupted operations, and deliver a transformation their day-to-day staff couldn’t support alone.
The overall program was charged with providing the following core value propositions:
- Improved customer experience through improved inventory accuracy & placement, faster & more stable check-out process with OMNI capabilities that better serve & engage their customers
- Enabled transition to higher-skilled workforce through best-practice processes & automation
- Improved stability & supportability at today’s volumes & allows scale for growth by combining buy and sell (sales & inventory source of record) onto one modern cloud & mobile-enabled platform
- Increased consistency & speed of availability of data throughout the organization by reducing the number of places they store, move, & manually adjust it
- Improved business continuity & disaster recovery capabilities through leveraging Oracle’s cloud size & scale to their advantage
- Extended POS & native OMNI capabilities to mobile devices allowing use at the POS & mobile with less intrusive (lower risk) integration with future custom mobile applications
The POS upgrade further sought to:
- Stabilize the point-of-sale environment by eliminating customized solutions
- Allow for POS to accept enhancements/upgrades by Oracle
- Modernize promotion and campaign capabilities
- Enable proactive alerting with near real-time data
Initial benefits from the POS upgrade were savings from:
- Maintenance reduction across vendor partners
- Extended support reduction
- Internal resource reallocation
A year into the plan, however, the team was challenged with orchestrating all of the moving parts, maintaining sight of the key project requirements and were concerned the timeline was at risk.
ENTER COLUMBUS CONSULTING
A partner of Hibbett for more than 10 years, Columbus Consulting was enlisted to ensure a successful and scalable deployment of the applications within the established timeframe.
According to Lynn Hughes, Managing Partner at Columbus Consulting and Client Manager for Hibbett, “our long-standing relationship with the Hibbett team allowed us to immediately immerse ourselves into the project. Knowing the people, processes and culture was important for us to start to identify any issues early, define gaps and quickly recalibrate cross-functional efforts. Between our client relationship and our retail expertise, we were able to provide value from day one.”
Once enlisted, the Columbus Consulting team conducted an overarching requirements assessment and gap analysis. The CCI retail experts quickly embraced the core roles of program/project management and business analysis. The overall team (which included members from merchandising, finance, store ops, digital/marketing, data and IT) was given a challenging date to complete the POS deployment to all 1,000 stores with integrated solutions as well as the new merchandise management system.
“In the midst of the project,” according to Mike Anthony, Oracle Retail Engagement Director, “Hibbett requested Oracle inject additional product expertise from Consulting, to support the Xstore Point of Service upgrade and the implementation of Oracle’s Merchandising application, MFCS. The success of this program was achieved through seamless collaboration between Hibbett, Oracle Consulting, Columbus Consulting and Retail Consult. Together, the teams met an aggressive schedule and delivered a robust solution that positions Hibbett for growth and an improved operational capability.”
HERE’S WHAT NEEDED TO BE DONE:
- Identify and clarify business requirements, determine system gaps and plan for resolving the gaps
- Seamlessly insert the identified project needs into the flow of the 5 program transition states
- Facilitate the streamlining of new cloud functionality across business divisions and operational teams
- Roll-out the ERP components and POS move from on prem to cloud on time and with minimal disruptions
According to Hugo Lopez, Operations Manager from the systems implementation partner, Retail Consult, “This program represented a significant transformation for Hibbett, bringing complex systems together under one cohesive cloud-based ecosystem. Our collaboration with Columbus Consulting, Oracle, and Hibbett’s internal teams was seamless — built on transparency, technical excellence, and shared accountability. Despite the project’s ambitious scope, we achieved major objectives on schedule, ensuring a smooth transition with minimal business disruption and a scalable foundation for future growth.”
RESULTS
Columbus Consulting leveraged a team of 5 expert consultants and an expanded team of 50 people including dedicated Hibbett resources, and Oracle professionals as well as the technical teams from Retail Consult. Columbus coordinated this “taskforce,” managed all communications and facilitated the workflow throughout the organization to keep the project on task. Along with Hibbett leadership, the team identified real-life scenarios to create and execute a series of small pilots that would pave the way for a risk-free, expedited deployment. After gathering, articulating and prioritizing the program requirements, Columbus Consulting further aligned all external and internal resources and helped deliver the deployment of new POS to 1,000 stores in 6 weeks. The merchandising platform also went live on time and with minimal areas of concern.
Quinn stated, “Any technology project comes with its own set of complexities, that is why working with retail experts like Columbus Consulting was critical to ensuring our success.”
What does this mean now for Hibbett? The brand is now well-poised to fully leverage their new investments across the organization. With a new Merchandise Management system, new inventory planning system, new POS systems and functionality, a refined ERP platform and new cloud-based solutions, the retailer can seamlessly and more effortlessly view inventory levels, address customer needs, and respond to external and internal business conditions/variables with greater speed and efficiency.
Client Manager, Hughes further commented, “the collective efforts of all of the parties involved ultimately allowed Hibbett to fast track their transformational journey, achieve substantial savings, build greater efficiencies, and provide integrated/more accurate customer visibility for enhanced experiences.”
For more about Columbus Consulting and what they do for retailers:
https://www.columbusconsulting.com/what-we-do/
ABOUT COLUMBUS CONSULTING
Columbus Consulting delivers solutions that drive true value and have been transforming the retail, grocery and CPG industries for over two decades. We are a retail consulting company of industry experts. Our approach is simple, if you do it, we do it. We are more than consultants; we are experienced practitioners who actually sat in our clients’ seats. We understand the challenges, know what questions to ask and deliver the right solutions. Columbus offers a unique, consumer-centric approach with an end-to-end perspective that bridges functional & organization silos from strategy to execution. Our specialties include: unified commerce, merchandising & category management, planning & inventory management, sourcing & supply chain, data & analytics, accounting, finance & operations, people & organization and information technology. Let us know how we can help you. To learn more, visit COLUMBUSCONSULTING.COM.