Service Soars at B. Moss

B. Moss is a successful, women’s apparel retailer based in the northern New Jersey town of Secaucus. Through a series of internal audits, the company’s executives realized that they were beginning to experience two of the problems often faced by growing chains: 1) manual processes limited productivity and 2) their small IT department was tasked with supporting an ever-increasing number of stores, stretching the staff too thin. The retailer resolved both problems with the installation of MICROS-Retail Store21 and its related service options.

Small IT Before, Small IT After
“There are only two people in the Information Technology department here at B. Moss,” says Deidre Reinisch, director of IT. “When I saw the range of support we could get from MICROS-Retail, and the quality of the service they could provide, I was sold.

“During the evaluation process I had to be cautious. I wanted to be sure that the company we selected would provide the services consistently, not push us to the bottom of the list during the busy season. I am delighted to say that MICROS-Retail lived up to its promises,” says Reinisch. “One of the services we have contracted for is Support Center. I used to handle all store support calls myself, sometimes 60 or 70 calls a day. Now the MICROS-Retail Support Center takes those calls and resolves the issues quickly. The service is so seamless that many of the stores don’t even know they’re calling outside our company.

“We also staged all of our registers in-house and maintained an inventory of replacement parts, which was time-consuming,” she continues. “Now MICROS-Retail handles our staging and depot functions. Having support has opened up a whole new world for us!”

More For The Store

“Our legacy system was fine in its time,” explains Reinisch, “but now that we have 78 very busy stores, we had to find a way to get more sales time for store associates.”

After a thorough review process, contracts for Store21 were signed at the end of 2002, and the rollout was completed seven short months later in June 2003. The changes were dramatic. The new system has reduced administrative time required to close the store by about 75% per store per day – time that store personnel now use to assist customers, close sales, and maintain the store.

Balancing each till used to take 2 hours because calculations were handled manually. Preparing the bank deposit was also manual and prone to error. Store21’s till counting and bank deposit tools automated the process, slashing the time required to handle these tasks and improved accuracy. There are now about 98% fewer errors in bank deposits.

Inter-store transfers, too, were prone to errors and delay because the process was manual. Sometimes transfers were not recorded for several days, even weeks. Now that Store21 tracks the transfers automatically, the counts are current and accurate at both of the stores involved in the transfer.

Even reporting is improved. Store21 enables the manager to view reports on-screen, rather than having to print multiple pages in order to find one number or to get an update.

On the front lines, associates were able to complete sales much faster. Store21’s price lookup features and deal pricing module eliminated many of the headaches at checkout.

“Our promotional discounts can be very complex,” explains Reinisch. “For example, buying three items at 40% off could entitle the customer to another item at 50% off. With the old system, sales associates had to use a calculator to determine the discount then entered the sale price manually. Naturally, that led to long lines at the checkout. Now Store21 handles all those calculations automatically. Lines stay short and customers are less likely to
walk out.”

Automating pricing also returned control to the home office. If a $69 item is to be sold at a 20% discount during the weekend, that price is enforced across the chain. No one needs to attempt to reconcile errors that result from miscalculating the discount or from keying in the price incorrectly. Furthermore, since the discounts show on the transaction screen, customers can see that the appropriate discount has been given.

Looking To The Future

With the basic store functions well under control, B. Moss is able to adopt technology- dependent revenue opportunities. They plan to implement MICROS-Retail Gift Card, a stored value solution that is pre-integrated with Store21. “Gift Card has the stability to deliver high performance and the flexibility to grow with us,” says Reinisch. “After using the system for a couple of years, we may decide to change the hosting, integrate the card with a CRM application, switch card packagers, or make some other change. MICROS-Retail Gift Card lets us do that. And both our customers and our stores can get support from the MICROS-Retail Support Center, which we already know delivers high performance.”