The Canadian men’s wear retailer expects this technology to shorten customer wait times at the register by speeding transaction times. At the same time, it will use the POS system to monitor retail sales trends and manage inventory in real time.
“Men don’t shop that often and it’s not a comfortable thing for a man to go out and buy clothing all the time,” said Dan Jasztrab, vice-president of information technology with Moores Clothing for Men in Etobicoke, Ont. “There’s nothing worse than having to stand in a mall and wait in a line-up.”
This is why its retail stores are predominantly located in “power centres” as opposed to malls, since men come into Moores for one purpose only: To buy something they need.
“We don’t view them as a one-time customer — (we’re) like a barber or a hairdresser that you would go to regularly that you rely on as part of your life,” said Jasztrab.
The company was previously using a DOS application running in a Windows 2000 environment, and wanted to move to an online system for better customer relations and inventory control. “We couldn’t do this on our old platform,” he said. “It was very cumbersome.”
Moores already had an existing installed base of Dell PowerEdge servers, OptiPlex desktops and Latitude notebooks, so it turned to Dell Retail Services for its POS and Windows XP upgrades.
“They wanted to do a forklift upgrade of some older technology that would integrate seamlessly with their corporate infrastructure that’s in place already,” said Scott Charlton, national brand manager with Dell Canada in Richmond Hill, Ont., Moores is now standardized on the same technology as its parent company, The Men’s Wearhouse Inc.
Monitoring trends
Moores’ POS solution includes the Dell OptiPlex GX620 desktop computer, Dell 15-inch LCD touch-screen display, APG cash drawer, Epson T88III thermal receipt printer, ID Tech magnetic stripe credit card reader and handheld bar code scanner -which is integrated with the Dell/APG Retail Integrator.
“Now that they’ve moved to a standardized solution with their parent company, the technology will help Moores to monitor their sales trends and assist with product shipping as well as enable them to manage their country-wide inventory in real time, so it really covered a lot of areas for them,” said Charlton.
In February, Moores set up training centres in Vancouver, Montreal and Cambridge, Ont., to train store managers on the application, who in turn trained their employees in a test environment in each store. The majority of stores will have two new machines and the larger ones will have three.
“Everything’s going to be online so we know where everything is, we know to the very minute when someone sells something,” said Jasztrab. “As far as supply chain management goes, it allows us to react quicker to a store’s needs.”
Moores has a couple of existing loyalty programs, which haven’t been as effective as the company would have liked. With the upgrade, the company will be able to take advantage of the Java-based POS system to revamp its programs into one enhanced loyalty program, which will be more responsive to its customers.