Retail and Hospitality
Comptoir des Cotonniers benefits from record time EPoS roll-out
27 June 2008
Fashion retailer, Comptoir des Cotonniers, with 300 stores in Europe, Asia and the US, has implemented EPoS solution, BeStore, from VCSTimeless.
Following successful trials in two stores, the retailer rolled-out the Microsoft .NET technology to all of its 300 stores. The latest technological innovations, inherent in BeStore, enabled the VCSTimeless teams to deploy the software in record time without sending a single support engineer to site. This was possible thanks to BeStore’s Installation Manager feature within the GlobalStore module which enables packets to be automatically sent to the stores. Using this system, around 10 stores were deployed per night, totalling about 50 per week. Deployment began in September 2007 and by the end of just six weeks, all 300 international stores had been equipped with the new solution.
The EPoS software was geared to each country’s own language, currency and fiscal regulations. BeStore manages payments, the price changes during sales, stocks as well as processes returns and inter-store transfers, credit notes and gift tokens. Store personnel have their own user interface with easily identifiable buttons for transactions and other customer service offerings, like loyalty schemes or alterations. It also gives instant access to information on stock, such as when articles will be delivered to stores.
“The existing system didn’t have any capacity for storing data at the store level,” said Marc Bernhard, IT director at Comptoirs des Cotonniers. “Whenever there was a problem with the internet link with our central server in Toulouse, our stores lost all the IT tools necessary for running an efficient retail business, and so they had to do all the essential tasks manually.
“With increasing pressures as our retail business expands, BeStore can cope with our busy sales periods and replenish articles within a day, every day. Our old system took at least twice this time, and it wasn’t always reliable. What’s more, markdowns now only take a matter of hours, this took days before.”
Further benefits have been achieved using BeStore, including faster re-ticketing for markdowns,
more reliable, quality data and faster transaction times.