CASE STUDY
WESTMORLAND GAINS MOMENTUM WITH LEAN POINT-OF-SALE CLIENT SYSTEMS
Motorway services, hospitality and leisure group Westmorland is already gaining cost and efficiency benefits from the first stage of a BCP Accord Momentum electronic point-of- sale implementation in its Tebay Services retail business
W
estmorland dates back to 1972 when it opened a service area, Tebay
Services, on the M6 motorway in Cumbria. As still the only family-owned and run motorway services in the UK, the company has developed into a multi-sited operation, employing over 500 people across six distinct businesses. These include the award-winning Rheged visitor centre on the outskirts of Penrith, a caravan park, The Westmorland Hotel and the J.38 Truck Stop, as well as Tebay services, north and southbound. Tebay Services – a landmark to all M6
drivers in the area and voted the best in the UK by both Egon Ronay and Which – includes farm shops, a butchers counter, lifestyle shop and cafes serving homemade food using local ingredients, including beef and lamb from the company’s own nearby farm. Although the existing electronic point-
of-sale (EPoS) system at Westmorland offered a resilient and effective till solution, it was felt that there was opportunity to gain greater benefits from this key retail
52 Spring/Summer 2014
system. Three key objectives were: to reduce hardware and infrastructure costs through greater and more effective use of lower consumption technologies; better optimise operating costs through access to real-time information to support more effective management decisions; and to reduce hardware maintenance, enabling service levels improvements instore, while also successfully reducing costs. Westmorland opted for Accord
Momentum, a lean client, cloud-based PoS system with functionality and a technical design that its supplier, BCP said can reduce retailer costs while delivering the flexibility to adapt quickly to ever-changing consumer demands. BCP is a UK supplier of specialist IT products and service to the retail industry, with key clients including SPAR, ISS, ARAMARK, ADM Londis and the Health Store. Critical to Westmorland was that risk
to current systems and service to customers was kept to a minimum. Therefore the Westmorland team worked with BCP to
develop a project plan that facilitated a mixed EPoS environment, allowing a store to trade using the new and existing POS applications concurrently, with the existing system on the current hardware platform and the Momentum solution on new low specification, low power consumption hardware from manufacturer Epson. The system has been deployed initially at
the company’s Tebay northbound motorway services operation, which has a high footfall with spikes at various times of day. Various metrics were set and
monitored over the project to assess success of the implementation and the Accord Momentum solution is more than meeting these objectives and delivering real business benefits. The new lower specification, greener
tills with solid state drives performed as projected and there was no deterioration in operator performance. Moving forward this will lead to substantially lower hardware costs. Reduced hardware maintenance will be measured fully over a longer timescale.
www.retailtechnology.co.uk
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