POS/Inventory Integration Boosts Sales At Wilsons Leather

By Matt Pillar, Integrated Solutions For Retailers magazine

When Scott Christian oversaw a JDA-driven POS software implementation in 2009, it was the new POS application's compliance with PCI (payment card industry) standards that gave him the most relief.

Christian, who serves as IT director at Wilsons Leather, had been losing sleep over the fact that his previous POS architecture stored unencrypted cardholder data at the POS. "It was very bad," he quips with a chuckle. That's a "we can laugh about this now" chuckle that he couldn't have mustered a little over a year ago. Unless you've been doing business under a rock, you're aware of the risk your company (not to mention your brand) is exposed to if cardholder data falls into the wrong hands. "Our old POS system was so heavily customized, it would have been a significant expense to retrofit for PCI compliance," he explains. The system he refers to certainly didn't owe the company anything — it had been implemented in advance of the great Y2K compliance initiative. Having decided on a full POS upgrade, Christian and the IT organization at Wilsons evaluated various players in the POS software space before choosing JDA. The choice was made primarily due to the promise of tight integration with the store's JDA-based back end systems. "POS is an extension of your host system, so to get the most value out of the POS, you must have tight integration between the two," Christian says. "The POS is the input. The merchandising system feeds off it daily for inventory updates based on sales and returns, and we drive daily and weekly replenishment based on that information."