COVER STORY Clarke commented: “If you’d told me two
years ago that we’d be bang on schedule with so few glitches, I’d have bitten your hand off.” And he added: “The commitment, dedication and camaraderie of the Arcadia and PCMS team has been key to the success of the programme.” Coldicott cited additional strategic benefits:
“We’ve also been moving from Windows to Linux, and investing in new tools to manage the estate proactively, so we can know in advance of a problem before it leads to a crash. It has also helped to simplify the drivers needed to run till peripherals, for instance.” The EPoS software development has enabled a
functionality as we went along, which was pretty unique in retail,” explained Steve Powell of PCMS, who worked alongside Coldicott and the rest of the Arcadia IT team to develop the PCMS software in line with the retailer’s requirements. “Arcadia didn’t want to do any long-winded development before the roll out,” added Powell. “Instead, we worked on continual development with small, incremental releases.” In order to manage Arcadia’s incremental
software development needs, PCMS worked with the retailer’s IT team to develop what essentially acts as message-broking translation or middleware layer to abstract and carry over any customisations to any future BeanStore software upgrades without requiring any major software re-engineering. “This enabled us to keep the basic user
interface the same, as well as simplify testing,” Coldicott said. It also gave the team the opportunity to incorporate new card payment processing software into the initial discovery phase and develop its integration to form part of the new EPoS software deployment. The project has also helped Arcadia to
streamline its IT capital expenditure. In addition to the original software replacement project, Arcadia also selected PCMS to design, build and host its new EPoS and card processing systems at its secure, hosted data centres in London and Coventry – significantly reducing the retailer’s ongoing running costs versus those of its older legacy systems.
12 Winter 2014
number of operational improvements, including centralised control over promotions. A move away from inefficient manual promotional and fraud prevention processes has also seen barcoded receipts introduced to ensure returned items can always be verified against the original sales record. Coldicott commented: “Given the number of
brands we have, where some stores or concessions are located quite close together, some transactions contain items from more than one of our brands.” And Clarke took up the point: “The increased
manageability of promotions and returns was a big benefit for us, especially where we have multi- branded stores. Before, staff would have to sort through a customer’s basket at the checkout to apply any relevant promotions individually, which often meant a long and complex transaction. “Now the EPoS software can apply promotions
automatically, where the transaction time for a multi-brand purchase came down significantly.” Now that Arcadia has the latest EPoS software
running in its stores and hosted by PCMS, both Clarke and Coldicott reported that, overall, the key benefit when compared to the old system is its reliability. “We’re no longer having serious issues with tills, where they regularly had to be rebooted before,” said Clarke. “This can have a serious effect on a smaller
store’s ability to trade, where they might only have two tills. And, of course, the roll out has increased the speed of transactions. I would also cite the way it now handles refunds, the consistency it allows us to bring to our promotions, and the ease of use for staff are also key benefits.” Coldicott added that, “the general
supportability of the software and its centralised structure” were an essential reason why the project has been such a success.
www.retailtechnology.co.uk
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