Large Retail Store Presence on the High Street

This customer is a high street retailer with 120 stores across the UK. We were involved from day one and have supplied a complete IT solution for their business including tills in the stores, head office backup and administration including payroll, hardware and ongoing support and maintenance.

Head Office

At head office, they have a complete back office system covering accounts, payroll, stock control and ordering. The stock control and ordering cover both the warehouse at head office and all the stores. They control all aspects of their product range from their Platinum software including barcoding, pricing and the offers that they want to provide in the stores, such as “buy one, get one free”, “buy two, get one free” and other variations of retail promotion that they require. This information is sent to the stores on an overnight automated routine which compiles the information to be transferred and uploads it to a central server on the internet. The information is then downloaded automatically by the individual stores and updates the store information with the products, prices and offers.

Retail Stores

The tills in the stores are touch-screen terminals where items can be sold using barcode scanners or using the touch screens which show product category areas and then product item buttons within those categories. The sales are processed through the tills and provided that there is an internet connection available, the details of the sale are communicated back to head office in real time. This allows footfall, sales and takings to be analysed with up to the minute data and the managing director reviews this information using our Platinum Online system on any mobile device that he has available at that time anywhere in the world. If the internet is not available for any reason, the sales information is queued up at the store and once communication is re-established with head office, the queued sales are sent to update head office. This allows the stores to continue to trade without interruption even if the internet is not available.

Stock taking in the stores and the warehouse is done using our Platinum Online system that updates the head office system in real time provided that there is an internet connection. Stock levels are synchronised with head office as part of the overnight data transfer routine.

The information from the stores updates the live accounts system on a daily basis in summary form to keep the volume of data to a manageable level. This can then be validated against the takings for each store to reconcile the figures and to flag up any anomalies such as shorts/overs on the takings. The stock control integrates with the accounting system so that stock and cost of sales information is generated automatically. The accounts system can produce a profit & loss for the whole business or by store if required. The accounting information can be extracted to file for further analysis specific to the customer.

Scalable

The customer has an integrated system to control his whole business that can be scaled up easily as new stores are added and at very reasonable cost.