Retail Standard: HARRODS Joins Growing Trend To Adopt Leading Industry Standard For EPoS Systems — The DigiPoS Retail Blade

HARRODS have committed to install 950 of the ground breaking till units after undertaking a typically meticulous assessment of other systems available on the market.

HARRODS has remained London's premier retail outlet and through constant innovation and evolution, has not only adapted to the changing trends throughout the years, but has also been at the forefront of them. Yet, the fundamental ethic of selling quality merchandise and giving customers exemplary service has never been questioned or compromised. In the case of technology the exclusive Retailer recognised the need to ensure that it also remains at the forefront of service to its customers and sees its PoS systems – now to be Retail Blade – as central to the technology strategy.

HARRODS is the store which began life as a small grocer's shop and now, 156 years later, occupies more than an entire block of prime Knightsbridge retail selling space with an unparralled international reputation. It is one of the most resilient and prestigious brands – and HARRODS technology at the point of sale serves millions of customers annually, across 330 departments and seven floors of retail space.

With almost 5,000 employees at HARRODS, many of whom are customer facing, the introduction of DigiPoS Retail Blade will bring improved speed and performance, increased flexibility and ease of use. Whilst for the HARRODS business as a whole the Retail Blade brings significantly lower cost of ownership, and warranty on the host system for up to 10 years.

In order to select the DigiPoS solution, the Information Technology team at HARRODS had to satisfy their own key performance, usability and cost criteria. In the final analysis it was seen again that DigiPoS with the Retail Blade delivered the optimum solution in terms of system warranty, ease of upgrade (just 60 seconds for Retail Blade) and the inbuilt ability for any one of the Blade units to be remotely interrogated and its operating performance assessed. As well as delivering these technology features the Retail Blade was also recognised as the best value contribution in terms of financial cost.

Peter Rush, EPoS Manager at HARRODS, headed up the Systems assessment programme and therefore had the opportunity to review the whole market – and to speak to other leading Retailers who have adopted Retail Blade. These now include popular fashion icon NEXT (500 stores) and highly successful international software/media retailer - GAME (400 stores). Peter Rush commented on the circumstances that led to the selection of DigiPoS:

"We see EPoS technology as one of the key ingredients to ensure easy and fast transaction processing to our mix of national and international customers. Our customers expect and receive service excellence; therefore within our service chain we have to ensure all elements continue to deliver the very best shopping experience. Reliability, cost of ownership and the ability of the supplier (DigiPoS) to work closely with us are also extremely important aspects. To ensure we covered all the bases we undertook a three month - arms length review of suppliers and their proposals. It was DigiPoS, with the Retail Blade offering who were repeatedly able to satisfy our enquiries, objections and could demonstrate a track record of performance that any IT supplier in Retail would justifiably be proud of."

The 950 system HARRODS roll-out commences in September with DigiPoS deploying the renowned service teams that have built the company's reputation over the past 10 years. With an implementation schedule of 6 weeks the timelines will call on the trained engineers and disciplined management of DigiPoS to deliver on a similar scale to that of the GAME installation where some 1200 Retail Blade systems were installed in just 8 weeks.