Greenwoods chooses Futura's retail technology to underpin expansion
Greenwoods chooses Futura's retail technology to underpin expansion
Greenwoods Menswear have chosen Futura as its technology partner, not only to replace an old system in 79 stores with the latest real-time technology, but also for plans to open a further 100-plus stores in future and to run the stock allocation for its new website.
Greenwood's new cash injection and technology investment allows them to move from a 20-year-old system to the latest retail technology, to improve its merchandising and stock control capabilities. It will be using Futura's "open to buy" facility to improve flexibility and allow merchandisers to buy smarter and so continue to offer customers competitive prices.
Neil Roberts, Greenwood chief operating officer, said: "With everything that is happening in the business, it was important for us to choose the right retail partner. As well as Futura's technology having all the functionality we need, it's their support and management people we found really impressive - these are people we can really work with."
Getting a central view on data
Karen Wang, information director of Greenwoods, said: "With Futura the information will be rationalised into one place so will be accurate and totally up-to-date, all our product lines, stock levels and branch performance will be visible in real-time. Futura Analyser, the data mining tool, will give us weekly and daily flash reports to enable us to monitor sales and margin performance by product and by branch so we'll have much better control of the business."
Following Christmas, the sales and the VAT changes there will be pilots in two stores in February and full roll out in March 2011. After that, Greenwoods will look at adding Futura's e-gift cards and new loyalty card system to track customer trends and offer special promotions to its customers.
The company will also be installing 80 Aures's Posligne Odysse touchscreen terminals, which offer a combination of design, style and high performance, the latest point-of-sale (PoS) technologies, 2.8GHZ Intel P4 processor, RAID 0/1, RFID, Wi-Fi Interface, SATA disk drives and thermal printers, pre-installed operating system and metrologic scanner.
New tills deliver added benefits
"In addition," Wang added, "we are implementing Integral's EFT [electronic file transfer] application to give us easier chip and PIN processing. At present we have a different system which means we have to enter the amount manually, which is obviously not as efficient so we are delighted Futura can offer us Integral's solution."
Futura are also writing bespoke software to link to the new website www.greenwoodsonline.com, Greenwood's 1860 suit hire system, to Sage's accounting package and to their warehouse solution, so that all the wireless scanners and warehouse terminals are updated at the same time as the scanners and system.
