Datavantage Delivers New Features Across Industry-Leading Retail Suite

Cleveland, Ohio, January 15, 2007— Datavantage Corporation a leading provider of retail technology for the specialty and general merchandise retail industry, today announced enhancements to its comprehensive suite of retail solutions, which includes Java-based POS store systems, analytics, merchandising, marketing applications and Microsoft Windows®-based POS. Companies may visit Datavantage and see product demonstrations in booth number 2104 at the National Retail Federation Convention & Expo in New York January 15-16, 2007.

 

“Our mission is to provide outstanding service and technology solutions to our clients so they can focus on what’s most important—delighting their customers,” said Chaz Napoli, president of Datavantage. “We’ve been an industry pioneer for nearly 20 years and continue to augment our product suite with leading technologies like Java, robust functionality enhancements and important data security standards.”

 

Datavantage technology unifies store systems, analytics and marketing. A choice of POS systems is available depending on the customer’s needs: Xstore™ Java POS for all retail environments; Store21® Specialty Retail POS; and Tradewind® Retail POS for higher volume, large format stores. Integrated with the POS offerings or available as stand-alone solutions are two exception-based analytics applications: Datavantage XBR® Store Analytics is an industry leader in loss prevention, compliance, and other store-data analysis; and Balance™ Sales Audit scrubs transaction data and streamlines data flow through an organization.

 

Completing the suite of integrated field management applications is Relate™ Retail CRM, an industry focused solution for customer relationship marketing. Relate’s architecture allows clients to deploy the software as one comprehensive solution or in specific modules, as needs dictate, with three retail-specific, business-building stages: loyalty, gift card and customer management, each supported by segmentation and campaign tools.

 

The new Xstore release 3 provides support for location-based inventory, ideal for jewelry retailers or large department stores. Retailers will also enjoy chain-wide, web-based reporting options against the central database; warranty tracking capabilities; and an enhanced deal processing engine to speed rebate, bounceback, and raincheck transactions. And because it’s developed in Java, Xstore continues to give retailers the choice, standards based architecture, functionality and flexibility they’ve come to rely upon over the past two years.

 

“As the leading United States retailer of guitars, keyboards and pro-audio and recording equipment, we wanted a solution that would give us the functionality we required, and the capability to incorporate new extensions to meet our unique business needs," said John Zavada, CIO of Guitar Center. “The migration from legacy POS systems to Datavantage Xstore in our more than 195 stores is expected to provide our sales associates with better sales tools, increase productivity and improve the overall customer experience.”

 

Store21 contains many enhancements such as: new security, access controls and tender types; signature capture for Symbol and Hypercom devices; and several streamlined processes that will save time for employees and consumers. In addition, retailers will benefit from new back office capabilities including an electronic journal for reviewing all database transactions, improved labor and inventory management functions that can run independently of front of store operations, and the ability for retail chains to access “house accounts” across multiple stores, simplifying the transaction for customers.

 

New features in Tradewind provide ease-of-use benefits such as: country specific address formats; employee fingerprint scanning to replace password logins; the ability to assign “return offender status” to help deter fraudulent returns; new send/sale functionality that triggers a reminder when to send a particular item to a customer; and support for the popular Mastercard® PayPass™ that enables payments with the tap of a card or other device.

 

Both Store21 and Tradewind are fully integrated with Relate. With new developments for loyalty account administration and maintenance, awards processing, card-customer association, customer segmentation descriptions and streamlined database and application server installation, Relate is the ideal solution for helping retailers create and manage an ongoing dialogue with their consumers.

 

As the most widely used loss prevention and store data analysis tool, XBR uses exception-based reporting methods to easily identify, track and respond to store events—everything from highest sale by an associate to a potentially fraudulent return. The latest version offers major enhancements for increased efficiency and ease-of-use. For example, XBR now offers a Java and browser-based web client portal to enable remote loss prevention and field management personnel to easily access and run queries over the Internet. This frees staff to work from anywhere and still access key analytics to aid decision-making.

 

“XBR’s capabilities for identifying non-compliance will be very useful, because it can help us improve operations as a whole,” says Jim Andreoni, CIO of Goodwill Industries of Southeastern Wisconsin, Inc. “Now that we have a rich data stream from Tradewind, we will be able to identify training issues and operational inconsistencies in a much shorter timeframe. The faster we can find them, the sooner we can fix them. Ultimately that means more money will be available to support our mission.”

 

A new version of Balance is easier and more flexible, allowing retailers to redirect sales auditors to revenue-generating activities or government mandated compliance regulations, like Sarbanes-Oxley.

 

Datavantage software solutions are PABP (Payment Application Best Practice) validated, and supported by a team of service professionals who provide project management, training, help desk, hardware purchasing, staging and data communications. For detailed product specifications, please visit www.datavantagecorp.com or call 888-328-2826.

 

About Datavantage

Founded in 1988, Datavantage Corporation is a retail technology company that helps retail chains, worldwide, gain competitive advantage with complete field management retail solutions. Designed to thrive in an ever changing environment, the solution set consists of open, Java-based store systems, analytics, marketing applications, Microsoft Windows®-based POS and professional services. The company's CommercialWare division is a leader in cross-channel retail commerce solutions. Headquartered in Cleveland, Ohio, USA, Datavantage is a subsidiary of MICROS Systems, Inc. Learn more at www.datavantagecorp.com.