STORES Magazine - April 2008 - (Page E3)

orifics. There are also issues as to line breaks; in Japan, the name must display all on one line, as it is considered discourteous to wrap a person’s name. • Different regulatory requirements. These include tax calculation, rounding (whether a percentage is rounded in the store’s favor or the customer’s), fiscal printing, etc. • Local variations in payment methods. Examples include swipe PIN debit (Canada), Chip and PIN (U.K.), Oystercard (U.K.), or Easypass (United States). These payment initiatives need to be handled by local integration, using a flexible architecture that allows implementation by local sources. To accommodate these local requirements, the basic POS system architecture must be open and based on a widely used global standard, enabling retailers to build capabilities onto the core product. The system must also be able to move into a new geography — country, region, whatever it might be — quickly, based on system configurability, flexibility, and openness for custom integration. stock of a certain item and the associate can instantly find it somewhere else, the sale can be saved and the customer taken care of. In the AMR Research report, 26 percent of surveyed retailers cited “increasing supply chain visibility of product status” as their No. 1 operational business initiative for 2008 — a steep increase from 7 percent the year before. “Increase sales volume of current products” was cited by 80 percent as a key element in their strategies to support future growth goals. These are two sides of the same coin; if you want to sell more of a current product, your associates have to help you, and if the location of those products isn’t visible all the way down to the associates (and the customers), they won’t be able to do that. The POS system also needs to be integrated across the store’s various channels such that, if an associate can’t find an item in the store, he can arrange for the online channel to ship it directly to the customer’s home. In designing global systems for customer satisfaction, it’s THE GLOBAL CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE There are two important fundamentals about global retailing. One is that, regardless of the number of countries in which a retailer operates, on some level it is a single enterprise with one brand (or suite of brands) to protect. The other is that no retailer is alone (for long, anyway) in seeking opportunity in a new or rapidly growing market; competition is a given. Maintaining the integrity of a brand and dealing with competition requires the ability to differentiate, and in today’s retail environment, whether in Sheboygan or Sarajevo or Singapore, the key differentiator is the customer experience. There are several ways in which a POS system can both enhance the customer experience and — assuming the system is truly global and fully integrated into the enterprise’s other systems — help maintain it across an expanding multi-national retail operation. One way is by providing the location of product inventory all the way down to the sales associate. If a store (or a display, for that matter) is out of APRIL 2008 / EPICOR important to remember that it isn’t just retailers that operate in different locations; so do customers. A global POS system needs to be tied into a global CRM database, so that if a VIP customer who lives in New York visits a store in France and presents a credit card, the system instantly knows who the customer is, alerts the associate to his or her significance and applies whatever discounts or loyalty points are appropriate to the purchase. INTEGRATION ACROSS THE ENTERPRISE The POS system is the key data intake portal for the retail enterprise system. Everything else — gross sales figures, store performance metrics, inventory control, markdown calculations, cash flow analysis, store/department staffing requirements, merchandising, CRM — flows from it. Many, if not most, of these functions are managed by specialized software solutions of their own, which means that an important measure of the usefulness of a POS system is how easily it can be integrated with these systems. E3

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of STORES Magazine - April 2008

STORES Magazine - April 2008 Contents Executive Editor's Page President's Page More Retailers Bagging Monthly Comp-Store Reports Time-Warner Center's Economy-Defying Results What Shoppers Think 10 Things You May Have Missed Numbers Worth Counting Full Price/Markdown Retail People Eating Locally Grocery Concept2Watch Restaurants Online Services Marketing Human Resources Product Lifecycle Management E-Commerce: Peer Reviews Drive Online Buyers Kiosks Recycling Operations Payment Systems POS Logistics E-Commerce: Getting Personal Website Management LOEB Retail Letter Arts Update Point of View NRF News Retail Industry Calendar Last Laugh

STORES Magazine - April 2008

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