POS Solution: The Anatomy Of A 4,200-Store POS Rollout

Mail Boxes Etc., Inc. upgraded the POS hardware and software at its 4,200 franchises, which operate as The UPS Store, to enable the collection of more granular POS data.

Rolling out new technology to stores scattered across a large geographic region is never an easy task. However, it is made more manageable when you develop a clear strategy, which is what Mail Boxes Etc., Inc. (MBE) did for its 4,200 U.S. franchise locations operating under the name The UPS Store. These stores provide document printing, packaging, and shipping services, as well as mailing and office supplies for purchase. When MBE decided to upgrade its POS systems, it planned a three-year rollout that addressed the franchisees with the oldest legacy systems first. "You can't just deploy 8,000 systems [the majority of locations have two systems] at once," says Tim Davis, VP of technology. "It is logically unfeasible to manufacture, stage, deploy, and configure that many systems in a short period of time." MBE now has the new POS system in 90% of its stores and is able to capture data that improves enterprise- and store-level decision making.

MBE's stores were using aging POS systems with homegrown software and various nonstandardized hardware platforms. The software was a problem because it didn't capture sales data at the SKU level; it only categorized sales at the profit center level. "A lot of SKUs can be buried under a profit center category, which doesn't give us the granularity we needed to have accurate sales data," says Davis. For example, the legacy POS software would record an item sold by its category (e.g. "Retail Shipping Supplies"), rather than as a specific item (e.g. "6-inch by 6-inch box"). Also, MBE needed more flexibility from its POS software. Because there are many different ways to ship a package or use the stores' document services, the transactions handled by The UPS Stores can vary widely. "This variety needed to be translated into the POS system, as one store's preferences might be different from another's," says Davis. "We needed software that we could easily customize for each store's needs."