What is it?
RMS’s capability to integrate with your eCommerce website to manage process and increase sales.

How can we use it?

• Click and Collect
• Sales leads direct to store
• Personal shopper/resource booking to name a few

What are the benefits?

• Seamless routing to the correct store for web requests
• Control of process
• Check list for in-store collaboration
• Compliance reports and tracking for each customer
• Central accessible store for all requests
• Up sell/cross sell opportunities
• Exception reporting for incomplete tasks and processes

See our website for more information the RMS’s Click and Collect module.

We recently kicked off our latest project with the German retailer – Gries Deco. Base near Frankfurt Gries Deco has been operating as a company for over 80 years and are now nearly 250 stores and concessions in Germany, Switzerland and Austria trading under the brand DEPOT.

This is one of the fastest growing retailers in Germany with a staggering average yearly growth of 30% since 2006 and it’s not hard to see why, the store I visited near the head office in Niedernburg was impressive. If I could compare it to a style or retail offering in the UK it would be a designer/cool – Dunelm/Habitat.

Homeware, Cookware, Art Prints, Soft Furnishings, Decorations may not sound inspiring, but the way Depot visually merchandise these areas is stunning – this is the differentiator. Each store has its own dedicated Visual Merchandiser along with a Regional and Area Visual Merchandising Manager. As you can imagine with this structure and amount of investment the results are impressive, not only in the visual displays but also the growth they are driving.

The stores (varying from 200 – 600 square metres) are divided into clear, yet seamlessly joined areas: Seasonal, Home Living, Kitchen and Decoration, to name a few. Four seasonal areas account for about 30% of total meterage and these four seasonal areas are changed weekly (a huge amount of change to manage, hence why RMS software is so applicable!). Fantastic displays illustrate the art of the possible, with component parts grouped around the display to enable the consumer to create the concept at home.

A significant part of the store, displays Gries Deco’s other key line of business – iPuro, a range of home scents and fragrances with candles and diffusers which are manufactured and wholly owned by Gries Deco.

Price points are varied with major capital items such as beds at 6-700 Euros through to 5 & 1 Euro display tables for customers to pick up small knick-knacks. Inbetween there is a wealth of mid-priced, stylish and designer-led home items that draw the eye and could keep you browsing very happily.

Whilst there are no plans for UK expansion, I would imagine this would be a compelling offer for the UK marketplace. Where Habitat failed through limited lines and price points, and also towards the end poor visual merchandising, Gries Deco seems to cover all bases. Innovative visual merchandising, great ranging and designer styling are helping DEPOT and Gries Deco to be a hugely successful business. The figures don’t lie; they seem to be creating a large and loyal following and no doubt will form part of many households furnishing trends for years to come!

Read more on our German business partner PortivITy.

‘Home knitted’ solutions

Only Governments and fools…………………..

It amazes me that some retailers still persist in the ancient art of software development in an age where every single business process has been coded. Not only is it supreme arrogance that any retailer can compete with dedicated software companies (yes, we are one), but also that the result is always the same – snapshot mimicking of existing paper process with little measurable business benefit. Think of it this way – tiny uncoordinated steps to oblivion.

Each step always appears to have been based on an urgent response to change and rarely manages to take a holistic and integrated view of the overall business need. Of course this is based on necessity and nobody has the luxury of a dedicated development team whose very existence depends on delivering excellent supportable code that exactly fits all aspects of the organisations needs on time and on price.

Unfortunately an internal development resource depends on never ending projects to ensure that continued employment is guaranteed…….

So why do so many retailers continue with poor, antiquated home grown solutions on which the very survival of their business depends? If we go back to the early years of computing the only way that automation could be applied to benefit the business was to write it themselves – because there was no other choice – there was no market of ready to go software.

But the world has changed – dramatically.

We now have a plethora of applications available from all quarters of the globe, this no longer a local play. From Smartphone apps to back end accounting solutions – the choice is vast – and growing daily.

So how does a forward looking business go about reducing cost and improving competitive efficiency?

The first step is to look at common mistakes – even when governments have practically unlimited budgets and resource we still read daily about expensive abandoned projects – so don’t try to boil the ocean.

The second step is to try to identify the areas of greatest and most frequent change these are the pressure points for older inflexible systems. A quick search across the web will normally produce a surprisingly large selection.

Choose a well referenced product preferably that is architected in a modular form as additional components may help accelerate improvement in other areas. Ensure at all costs that it will integrate with existing solutions and can be easily (and cheaply) modified to fit your processes.

Low cost, flexible package are available for almost every process imaginable and awaiting your discovery – the speed of their adoption will reflect in the strength of your organisation.

No retailer can afford to have a crack team of coders ready to react specify, code and deploy at the speed which business changes today – particularly when whatever change you are reacting to is busy being  developed in a range of dedicated software houses around the planet.

Speed of reaction is the defining attribute for successful retailers; IT solutions that prevent this along with an ongoing fixed cost are not acceptable. The only way to achieve the degree of fluidity is to rank your potential change requirements according to their rate of change and look out to the market for nearest fit.

Not only does this approach make the business supremely agile, but by selecting components that are absolutely fit for purpose can save millions of pounds in development costs – it is widely accepted that each line of code produced by a developer costs between £6.33 to £7.60 per line – that today means an averaged sized package costs somewhere between £2,500,000 and £5,000,000. That is a cost few businesses are aware of as it is rare that the full infrastructure and team costs are accounted for completely. All for capability that can be acquired for a fraction of the cost externally and adapted to precisely fit the business need.

So to summarise – getting the business to choose software components that answer their immediate needs, which can integrate and complement existing internal and external solutions is a must. Re-aligning IT resource to help select and integrate external solutions to allow business agility and of course to dramatically reduce cost and dependency on key internal resource is a winning game plan.

RMS’s Solutions Introduction

RMS and PortivITy are delighted to announce the signing of the German retailer – Gries Deco Company. Trading under the brand Depot, Gries Deco has over 250 branches, mostly in Germany but also in Austria and Switzerland.

The Depot brand offers a unique mix of contemporary home furnishings and decorations and has realised significant growth in the last 5 years.

Working with our German business partner PortivITy, RMS will implement their award winning Operations Director solution to the Depot estate over the next couple of months.

Commenting on the win Simon link, RMS Sales & Marketing Director, said:

“We are delighted to be working with Gries Deco in partnership with PortivITy to implement our Operations Director product set.  We are excited to be working with a company such as Gries Deco, who are already one of the success stories of the German retail sector. With the continued success of our recent projects with Denner, continental Europe is set to become a far larger part of our business and working with PortivITy I know we will deliver a solution that will give significant business benefits to Gries Deco.”

Read more on RMS Customers.

How chilling to see the dreadful publicity collected by the big four supermarkets in BBC’s Panorama program on Monday 5th December 2011.

Having collectively spent billions of pounds creating, building and maintaining their brands the program will have undoubtedly have left their customers feeling cheated and distrusting.

There is no doubt that a large majority of the errors shown were just down to poor ticketing rather than deliberate intent. This must make the pain being felt in boardrooms across the country even more intense.

The sad fact is that all of this brand damage is absolutely unnecessary, with the RMS Print Controller product all signage and ticketing is rule checked at the final point of print to eradicate these errors. Layers of rules can be applied to validate multi-buy, bogof, value and any variation of price change offer – no violation of trading standards or corporate image can get through.

In the frenetic world of the supermarket promotion control attempting to tame data from multiple sources to be accurate, meaningful and legal is an impossible task – that is why RMS Print Controller is designed to act as a ‘Gate Stop Guardian’ to assist customers in achieving legal compliance.

This ensures not only that brand values are respected but also the cost of print production can be reduced by over two thirds from traditional methods.

Read more about RMS’s Print Controller.

Watch the program on BBC iPlayer: Panorama – Supermarkets: What Price Cheap Food?

RMS is delighted to announce the signing of the contemporary British designer fashion brand – Hobbs.

Working closely with the Hobbs operations team, RMS over the course of the coming months will be implementing RMS’s award winning Operations Director, People Director and Process Director solutions to increase efficiency and cut cost in this leading high street brand.

Hobbs opened its first store in Hampstead in 1981 and is one of the most successful brands on the high street with over one hundred branches throughout the UK and Ireland.

Commenting on the win Karen Dyke, Managing Director at RMS said:

“We are delighted to be working with Hobbs as one of the UK’s most admired fashion brands. The project team at Hobbs have already demonstrated their passion and excitement for the RMS solution, the impact and expectation of the RMS delivery is huge. We know the impact of the solution will be significant and I know that Hobbs will not stand still, with further RMS modules already being eyed up!”

Read more on RMS Customers.

RMS are delighted that Arcadia have rolled out Operations Director to all their brands; Burton, Dorothy Perkins, Evans, Miss Selfridge, Outfit, Topman, Topshop and Wallis.

Congratulations to all the Arcadia operations teams and also to the RMS team for another successful project and a happy customer.

Feedback from stores has been superb with comments such as…

“Mainly The Word has really benefited stores and been a great resource and support, and also a great prompt for stores for recalls/promotion/reprices etc.”

“I’m new to the company and I find The Word very, very helpful. All I need seems to be on here.”

“I think it’s a great move on from the old system of emails; love how I can pop in & out.”

“The Word has helped me as a new manager to help keep in contact with what is going on in side head office and within the company and to help my staff with VM help and training.”

“You’re always up to date on the very latest information.”

“I love that everything is in one place! It leaves our office so much tidier.”

“Love the fact that you can find any piece of information within seconds from every business related topic. It shows what’s a ‘need to know’ and all info is set into clear sections.”

“Everyone has access to the same information and it’s updated at the same time so we know when to log on or look for documents.”

By Annisa Farese, www.storetechsummit.com

Throughout the past 30 years, Nolan Bushnell has created a name for himself as an innovator in retail technology. As the founder of both Atari and Chuck E Cheese Restaurants, Bushnell has seen ideas flop and new technologies soar.  It’s with this insight that Bushnell sat down with Amber Oldfield, Producer of StoreTech Retail Technology Summit, to weigh in on the future of the retail experience.

Amber Oldfield: Given the buzz around technologies in the retail industry such as RFID and mobile payments; what do you think brick and mortar stores will look like in the next 10 years?

Nolan Bushnell: The brick and mortar stores needs to focus on the elements of shopping … I believe that shopping and purchasing is an entertainment form and it is no longer really about the acquisition of goods. If you want to do that, the internet does it well.  Right now providing a customer service experience is really where it is. We can talk about secure payments and a lot of the boring stuff but I don’t think the real power comes from the marketing idea… the stores that provide the most enjoyable experience will continue to prosper and the ones that don’t won’t.

AO: With more and more communication occurring through the use of technology; what benefits do you believe can still be gained from shopping “brick and mortar”?

NB: Like I say, the big space gives “try before you buy”, gives texture and gives things that you cannot transmit through online medium… I think [online] browsing is not the same as shopping. Shopping is an enjoyable experience when you are looking for the right gift. Online shopping can be a muted experience. The initial bandwidth that you have in a physical location is about 1000x times higher than what you would have in an online window and until we have complete immersive virtual reality gear that limitation will still be there.

AO: Outside the retail world, even meeting with colleagues, do you believe there are still tangible benefits to these face-to-face meetings over doing business via email?

NB: Absolutely, I think that we see this all the time… people get real cabin fever! They talk about nesting and all that, but at the same time most people that work at home do not like it. They do it but they don’t like it. There are exceptions all over the place but they want to hang out with the guys in the office. You see that both on the TV show and in physical life.

AO: You took some risks at Atari – one of which was hiring a described “hippie” named Steve Jobs. Given his recent passing, what kind of legacy and impression do you think he will leave on the world of technology?

NB: I think that Steve had a world dominant sense of style… a single minded vision of a simple computing environment in which he controlled everything and therefore made sure that it fit a very, very narrow demographic of usability and simplicity… What he did was make computing simple and I felt that one of the biggest mistakes that the board of directors made was when they let him go. I think Apple would have been a very different company; but who knows back to the future is a scary game to play.

AO: Do you believe this simplicity in design is something that clearly started with Apple?

NB: I would hate to think what the state of computing would be without the Macintosh [computer]. The Macintosh was such a dynamic move, even Microsoft was so dominant at the time nobody paid attention until it was Windows 3.0. What happened to Windows 1, 2, 2.5 and 2.4 – they were God awful! … totally unusable.

It’s clear from this conversation that there has been a shift in recent years regarding retail technology in both consumer product offerings and the presentation of these products to the public. But the driving force behind both product and presentation is the rapidly evolving consumer expectation.

“One of the things that retailers of all sizes need to understand is that nobody is staying in their box anymore,” says Bushnell, “ We are going to be dealing more and more with this concept of trans-media and increasingly retailers will be woven into the fabric of the media landscape. And the retailers need to understand how they play a part in the evolving media landscape. Books now are integrated with movies and television, video games, and Twitter & Facebook. Retail establishments need to really start to understand the social dynamic of how people consume information today… I really think increasingly, retail is going to be about how you package those little bits in new ways and build them into the brand.”

Nolan Bushnell presents on this topic and more as Keynote Speaker of the first annual StoreTech – Retail Technology Summit, February 19-21, 2012 in Palm Springs, Calif. For more information on this event, please visit www.storetechsummit.com. To learn more about other CraigMichaels events, visit www.craigmichaelsinc.com.