STORES Magazine - February 2009 - (Page 45)

people didn’t have to go to a central cashier every time they wanted to ring up an item and the system could run faster, even if it was on a slower frame relay line.” It took some time and several rounds of training to ensure that store associates were using the correct procedures to receive and check inventory and track damages. “This got perpetual inventory accuracy to a point where replenishment worked,” Lemieux says. “We found the holes and now we’re investing inventory in the right places.” Employee hotline Nonetheless, training continues to be a key factor in the system’s success. Ratner established an employee hotline “that enabled us to track down and correct problems,” he says. “Sometimes it was a matter of the warehouse not shipping correctly. But we also were able to determine if damages were being accounted for and if receiving was being done properly.” The company also made a simple change in terminology. “We started out calling it automatic replenishment, but changed it to centralized replenishment,” Lemieux says. “The idea was to get people not to think of this as an automatic process that would run itself. There are many steps a store has to take to make sure replenishment works. Like any system, it requires care and feeding to work properly.” Ratner now is “very close” to automated replenishment. “Now it’s a minimum-maximum replenishment based on a salon’s sales,” Lemieux says, but the current system doesn’t react well to new products, items without a sales history or those that have a significant promotional lift. “We have to compensate by pushing product out for promotion,” he says, but anticipates that “in the future our need to do that will be reduced.” StORES Len Lewis is a veteran retail industry journalist and commentator and the editorial director of Lewis Communications. STORES / FEBRUARY 2009 45 to consist of approximately 30 new salons in 2009.) While “behind the chair” services represent the bulk of Ratner’s revenues, about 12 percent comes from selling hair care products. But inventory problems were the rule rather than the exception, according to Lemieux. Part of the problem stemmed from a manual inventory system. “Stores would order products when they thought they needed them,” he says. “In essence, we had 1,000 merchants out there consisting of a salon leader and stylists who were trying to figure out how much of each product they needed. There’s a lot of emotion when people think they know what’s going to sell. Managers were ordering product and hoarding it and others couldn’t get what they wanted because the central warehouse in Pennsylvania was getting sucked dry. “In some cases, salons ended up losing sales while others were overstocked,” Lemieux says. Full rollout completed Ratner partnered with Tomax to install its Retail.net system and shift to fully centralized inventory replenishment, beginning with 40 pilot stores in WWW.STORES.ORG 2004. “We ran into a variety of design issues and had to rework it, but we finally got the system working the way we wanted and it’s been fully rolled out,” Lemieux says. Ratner salons require more than a simple cash register POS system. “We needed it to influence and enforce our process flow,” Lemieux says. “We use it to check customers in, then move them to service and finally to checkout. This enables us to track customers from the moment they walk into a salon. It helps us enforce the ‘first come/first served’ concept at a salon like the Hair Cuttery. It also helps with loss prevention because it’s harder for someone to pocket the money when we have a record of a customer coming in.” In order to adjust Retail.net for a salon environment, Ratner needed a customized front-end system that supported the existing check-in process. The first attempt was a server-based system using dial-up lines that ran very slowly. “We had to create a more persistent network and we did that by using DSL and some frame relay lines where DSL isn’t available,” Lemieux. At the same time, Ratner redesigned the system’s architecture “to put more smart function into the salons. This way http://www.Retail.net http://www.Retail.net http://WWW.STORES.ORG

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of STORES Magazine - February 2009

STORES Magazine - February 2009 Contents Executive Editor's Page President's Page Are You a Pusher or a Puller? What Shoppers Think Online Retail Satisfaction 10 Things You May Have Missed Numbers Worth Counting Full Price/Markdown Retail People Cover Story - Something’s Got to Give First Look Concept2Watch Online Partners Merchandising Sustainability Inventory Systems Drug Store Systems Business Intelligence Inventory Managment Online Marketing Supply Chain - Better Data, Better Decisions Returns Management - Identifying Fraud Data Security - Securing Intimate Data Anti-Shoplifting - Mall of Shame? Risk Management - Securing Consumer Confidence Loeb Retail letter ARTS Update Point of View NRF News Retail Crossword Retail Industry Calendar End Cap

STORES Magazine - February 2009

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