Harrods, the world's most famous department
store, is using a new £1.5m electronic
point of sale system to allow it to target customer promotions,
discounts and services, and integrate its growing on-line sales
operation with the rest of the business.
The move is part of a five year strategy to move the store to a
service oriented IT architecture. It will allow Harrods sales staff
to tailor their approach to customers based on the company's
knowledge of customers' preferences and shopping habits.
David Llamas, Harrods' IT director, said, "Harrods attracts 12
million visitors a year, making it the third-most visited
destination in the UK," he said. "But we also have customers who
can spend £1m in a private viewing or via a personal shopper. We
want every customer to have the best possible experience when they
cross our threshold."
For this to happen Harrods had to reform its IT infrastructure.
So far it installed a
SAP ERP system for stock control and accounting. It also
replaced its eight-year-old Anker tills with DigiPos Retail Blade
tills and RBS-Instore epos software from
Retail Business Solutions.
Harrods started rolling out the RBS-Instore epos system in its
airport stores in June 2006 as part of a trial before implementing
it on the 950 tills in the flagship Knightsbridge store in
November.
Llamas said they used the opportunity to install applets such as
dynamic currency conversion and sales for export on the tills to
make transactions quicker, easier and more flexible for
customers.
The retailer will also unveil a new website in August. This plus
a new call centre system will share an Oracle back-end server to
capture and fulfil orders. Other retailers get 15% to 18% of their
sales from online, Llamas said. "We want to beat that."
The final step now is to put Harrods' restaurant onto the
RBS-Instore Hospitality application for restaurant sales. "Harrods
will then have a single standard uniform view of the business and
the customers will have a uniform experience at the till," Llamas
said.
After that, Harrods will advance work on its loyalty card
system. It already has three levels from green to gold rising to
black. This could affect Harrods' desire for a deeper customer
relationship management system it calls clientelling.
"We want to put the details in our sales staff's little black
books regarding customer preferences and shopping habits onto the
system. This means all our sales staff will be able to cross-sell
and up-sell via targeted promotions and discounts to individual
customers. This was impossible until we got the new epos system,"
Llamas said.
"We have also looked into identifying customers when they enter
the store, and that holds some very interesting possibilities," he
said. "However, we are reluctant to do that until we have sorted
out the privacy issues."
Llamas said the aim is that no matter what sales channel
customers use, the 1.4 million catalogue items Harrods carries are
available, presented appropriately and sold efficiently to build
and retain customer loyalty.
This is tricky for Harrods because some, such as furniture, are
tailor-made, and the associated data require different handling
compared to fashion or food and beverages, he said.
System availability and data security are top priorities for
Llamas. Under RBS-Instore the tills operate independently of a
central server, but the organisation has much greater insight into
what is happening at the till because of constant message passing
to and from the ERP system.
Llamas said Harrods has been lucky with its timing. "We were
already moving to systems that allow us, for example, to encrypt
much of the data, such as credit card numbers." As a result Harrods
is one of the few retailers that are now compliant with
PCI:DSS, the credit firms' new data security standards, he
said.
Harrods looks for fourfold Web trade growth with .net
>>
Harrods >>
Comment on this article:
computer.weekly@rbi.co.uk