Case study: Harrods

New electronic point-of-sales system provides information on-demand

Llamas: we wanted to give users the functionality they were asking for

Luxury retailer Harrods is a busy business. About 950 tills are open on a peak trading day, dealing with about 1.4 million different catalogue items.

IT director David Llamas quickly realised that it was crucial to set up the right Epos systems to deal with the flow of customers and information.

The previous system from retail IT provider Anchor had been running for about eight years and with the business becoming more reliant on the information Epos could provide, Llamas saw it was time for a change.

He turned to Epos specialist Retail Business Solutions (RBS), completing the Java-based implementation in its Harrods store in November last year.

‘RBS gave us an end-to-end design that meant we could cope with change management decisions,’ says Llamas.

He says there is nothing new or surprising about RBS’ Retail Java project – more that it is an attempt to materialise some of the organisation’s ambitions to make the business processes more standardised and flexible.

‘We wanted to give users the functionality they were asking for and to see how these benefits occur has been refreshing,’ says Llamas.

RBS simply swapped-out existing front-end tills and trained staff. And reactions have so far been very positive.

‘The idea was to provide similar functionality so that change management would be controlled,’ says Llamas. ‘The users have been very positive and the average speed per transaction has been increased.’

The project has also been an enabler for many other initiatives and process reviews, allowing

Llamas to put in place new programmes such as Harrods’ reward card system.

‘Before we had less visibility about the status of our tills – now we are ready,’ he says.

‘And what that means is we can analyse true profitability. Before there were areas that lacked

inventory control and analytics – and having that information for the business is invaluable because users have visibility of any problems and can put a correction in place.’

Llamas plans to roll out the Retail Java system across the organisation’s hospitality areas later this year. The system will also be used in Harrods’ airport shops in the new Heathrow Terminal 5.