Pacsun is a Southern California-born lifestyle brand built at the intersection of fashion, music, art, and sport. Founded in 1980 as Pacific Sunwear and headquartered in Anaheim, California, Pacsun operates more than 300 stores nationwide alongside Pacsun.com, offering a curated mix of owned and partner brands, including Formula 1, The Met, UFC, Brandy Melville, and Fear of God ESSENTIALS, alongside its own private label.
Industry: Retail
Region: United States
Products and services:
Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management
Dynamics 365 Finance
Dynamics 365 Commerce
Power BI
An aging system, running out of room
Pacsun ran on Island Pacific, an on-premise ERP that had served the business well for years but was approaching end of life. Retail, eCommerce, wholesale, and finance each lived in separate, siloed systems that had grown up independently over time. Reconciling sub-ledger and financial data was a manual, recurring task. Inventory adjustments, landed costs, and purchase orders were split across different systems, forcing the finance team to reconcile across systems just to close the books. One team member described the experience as “constantly running into limitations of Island Pacific.” For example, inventory movements could only be tagged to a set of generic adjustments buckets, because the old system had no room for more.
Adding to the complexity were nearly 140 distinct integration touchpoints: a third-party POS and OMS platform, PLM system, a third-party logistics warehouse, EDI for wholesale, and a collection smaller tools for chargebacks and ticketing. Pacsun handles roughly 30,000–40,000 sales transactions a day across around 100,000 active SKUs, and none of that volume had a unified source of truth.
After a few years of modernizing its other technology systems, it was time for Pacsun to upgrade its ERP to a cloud-based, scalable platform that could support it in the future. Dynamics 365 was Pacsun’s platform of choice for its wholesale operations and was selected to support the rest of the business.
Dynamics 365 brings every channel together
Sunrise designed and delivered a unified Dynamics 365 Finance, Supply Chain Management, and Commerce solution that consolidates every one of Pacsun’s channels onto one cloud-based platform. Highlights of the project include:
One platform, one source of truth
For years, closing Pacsun’s books meant tracing sub-ledger data, inventory adjustments, and purchase orders by hand across systems that didn’t talk to each other, on a platform with little room to grow. Pacsun’s first financial close on Dynamics 365 looked nothing like that. “It worked fairly smoothly, even on the first close,” says Michael Miles, VP, Controller at Pacsun. Team members can now reconcile down to the individual transaction inside Dynamics 365, rather than triangulating between BI tools and multiple source systems and expect that process to keep getting faster as familiarity with the new platform grows.
Pacsun’s team was candid in describing the partnership with. “[Sunrise has] some of the better consultants I’ve worked with,” Miles says, noting the team “really understood the issues and came with solutions.” Michael Behar, who leads inventory accounting at Pacsun, added that the Sunrise team was “extremely knowledgeable” and “made themselves available around the clock.”
Today, Pacsun has the foundation to scale its omnichannel operations without the reconciliation work that used to come with every new system added. As one Pacsun leader summed up the project itself: “These things only go as well as the team you get, and it was a really good team.”