EPOS everywhere

EPOS everywhere

EPOS used to be about little more than recording item level sales to produce mountains of largely unused data. Today it’s different: it numbers drive buying plans, staff schedules and the entire supply chain, as Penelope Ody notes You Street Even would the store be smallest hard-pressed without independent some these sort days seems of to find EPOS to a High system. have a suitable terminal capable of linking sales directly to financial applications or even a website. EPOS is mature, stable and – one would imagine – becoming something of a commodity. A typical replacement cycle for major retailers, according to Martec International, is slightly more than nine years. So what more is there to say about EPOS?

It would seem quite a lot, because not all of the applications out there appear to be as efficient as the business would wish. As Dan Juriansz, senior pre-sales consultant for MMS and store systems at JDA, discovered: “I was in a major High Street chain in Portsmouth recently and bought three shirts for the price of two as a special promotion – only the checkout operator had to ring in the three items and then give me a 100 per cent discount on one of them as the system couldn’t handle the deal automatically. I was amazed. It had never really occurred to me to emphasise that our system can do this – I thought they all could,” he says. So much for commodity.

A few years ago if you asked IT directors why they were upgrading their systems the answer usually had, as Juriansz suggests, something to do with the IT not keeping pace with business and marketing needs. Promotional attributes in a marketing-oriented retail world are just part of the story. Today’s EPOS software has to drive customer relationship tools, workforce management and business intelligence. For supply chains increasingly preoccupied with the notion of flowcasting it also is the key provider of metrics for demand planning and forecasting.