Relyant Retail, one of South Africa`s largest furniture retailers, is in the process of shedding in-house and mainframe-based store systems in favour of a comprehensive retail software solution from Universal Computer Services (UCS).
The roll out of the UCS solution into ex-Amrel Stores has already commenced with the implementation of Furniture City, and it is planned to complete the other ex-Amrel Brands in August this year.
The move will enable Relyant to optimise stock holdings and streamline merchandising, as well as dramatically bolstering the quality and quantity of management information available.
"We outsourced in order to ensure that we have the best systems available, consistent high levels of support and service, and appropriate top class resources available to us," says Relyant Retail Group IT Director, Doug Wishart.
Relyant was formed mid-1998 with the merger of The Beare Group and Amalgamated Retail Limited. The chain has about 580 branches throughout South Africa, as well as in Lesotho, Botswana, Namibia and Swaziland.
It comprises a number of furniture chains - including Beares, Savells, Lubners, Melody`s, Fairdeal, Furniture City, The Bargain Shop and Geen & Richards - as well as Early Bird Services and fully-fledged life and short term insurance companies.
"UCS offers an excellent solution for a distributed retail business such as ours," says Wishart. "We had already deployed the UCS solution throughout Beares and Savells stores, and it made perfect sense to roll it out to our other brands.
"UCS is highly focused in this market and has top technical staff, backed by an outstanding knowledge of the local furniture retail market."
The UCS solution replaces a combination of in-house and mainframe-based systems, and places Relyant on a solid technological footing for the future as well as ensuring that the new millennium poses no threat to the group`s operations.
UCS software in-store handles debtors, stock, ordering, deliveries, the granting of credit, credit follow up and banking. Plans still in the pipeline include the computerisation of various registers and a sundry purchase order management system. A long-term target is to computerise all store-level processes that warrant it.
At head office, UCS systems facilitate consolidated reporting interfaces to other components, such as general ledger, creditors, payroll and cashbook. UCS has also supplied a merchandise decision support system that provides a view of current and historical stock holdings and sales figures. This will streamline ordering and merchandise management.
The solution also extends to regional debt recovery centres, where trained collectors will tap into system information to recover overdue accounts.
If customer correspondence is required to be generated, UCS provides data files for printing at bureaux. In addition, UCS will produce data required for customer statements.
All central equipment is housed at UCS`s premises in Gauteng and is operated on a facilities management basis, charged monthly.
"The UCS solution will improve asset management, with debtors and stock being our key assets," says Wishart. "Once all the stores are live, we will have up-to-date management information from all the stores on a daily basis."
According to UCS director Kevin Gray, UCS`s retail solutions are designed to streamline workflow on the shopfloor and to provide the tools to manage and run businesses better.
As a distributed solution, every store has fingertip access to all the information it requires for normal business activities and each store system is fully self-sufficient. Store applications are totally integrated, which ensures that data need not be recaptured.
"The software is totally customised for Relyant and is enhanced on an ongoing basis," says Gray. "There is also a change management system which caters for system modification, testing and release.
"Costs are low because the system is based on Linux, a free operating system. This also releases Relyant from the `upgrade trap`, eliminating the need for periodic, costly software upgrades which invariably lead to hardware upgrades too."
Relyant`s operations are based on industry-standard Intel PCs, facilitating good pricing on bulk orders as well as simplifying maintenance and support. Central hardware is also "vanilla" Intel PCs, facilitating expansion and contraction of store populations at low expense.
Application support is handled at UCS by qualified programmers who access Relyant stores over the network. "Because of the power of Linux remote diagnostics, all but the most serious problems can be resolved quickly without despatching experts into the field," says Gray.
The Relyant implementation is being tackled using UCS`s standard "big bang" approach, providing all the benefits of all stores up and running on the same system from day one.
Share
Editorial contacts