National Stores, a California-based retailer with more than 350 locations across 22 states, operating multiple brands including Fallas, Fallas Paredes and Fallas Discount Stores, recently inked a deal with RTC Consulting to be their strategic partner for JDA MMS technical support.
TSC Stores ditches their paper based loyalty program and launches RTC’s Customer Loyalty Rewards (CLR) solution, one of the most robust in the industry. Now shoppers are rewarded with points instantly at the POS, and they can use those points in the same transaction, building excitement and increasing customer satisfaction. Read more…
Vail Resorts, one of the premier mountain resort companies in the world, recently purchased Whistler Blackcomb Holdings Inc, a major ski resort and by many measures the largest ski resort in North America. As a longtime Vail MMS consulting partner, the RTC team, led by our Executive Vice President, Devan McArthur, was brought in to establish a new corporate Canadian MMS environment, then populate the environment with data from Whistlers legacy SAP database. RTC and the Vail project team completed this project on time and on budget. A future project will be defined to merge the two businesses into one corporate MMS environment in the near future.
Tractor Supply (TSC Stores), a Canadian owned and operated retailer with 49 corporate stores, engages RTC to implement a Reserve management facility within their JDA MMS merchandising system. “Store Reserve” allows a store to receive ecommerce product(s) and upon receipt, the inventory will be put into a separate “bucket” called Store Reserve so that these quantities will be omitted from the rest of the available store inventory. Any product that is in Store Reserve will not be included in replenishment for the store and is the first phase towards available inventory accuracy that can be published on the corporate website.
Ecommerce fulfillment is a major challenge in any omni-channel operation. Allowing shoppers to buy online is great, but having a process in place to be able to fulfill online orders from anywhere, is true omni-channel.
In 2015, TSC Stores signed on to outsource the bulk of its IT operation to RTC. The deal included RTC taking over responsibility for all MMS operations (ASP), software maintenance and development and further leveraging RTC’s suite of MMSxTend applications including StoreMobile and Warehouse Optimization. Furthermore RTC has helped TSC make significant enhancements to their replenishment systems. These integrations are now complete, allowing TSC to be able to vastly improve their operational workflow while viewing, collecting and managing key information real-time to MMS. Having visibility and control of merchandise is the first step towards building an Omni Channel system to fulfill customer demands in today’s retail environment.
Every company’s fulfillment strategy is unique based on their internal infrastructure and operational capabilities. In the case of TSC, store pick up was an important channel in their ecommerce fulfillment strategy. Allowing shoppers to pick up Ecommerce orders in the store provides additional opportunities to interact with the shopper and increase sales. However, store pick up requires complete visibility and control of inventory, as well as the processes must be in place to handle pick up and sales.
“Our stores and Inventory teams are very excited to have this added functionality to better manage their available product for sale. Future phases will include a “bucket” for damaged inventory for added accuracy. This first phase of Ecommerce Store Reserve will be one of the stepping stones to providing visibility of our inventory by store location to our customers on our website. Once again, RTC worked with us from a vision to implementation with very few issues. says Susan Ross Director, IT & Capability Building at TSC Stores.
Phase two will allow full integration with the ecommerce website and provide system recommendations on fulfillment locations for each customer order accounting for store location, availability and expected receipts.
RTC recently completed a huge store systems upgrade at TSC Stores Canada, a Canadian owned and operated retailer with 49 corporate stores. This all-encompassing deal included replacement of their legacy WINDSS POS store system with RTC’s StoreMS POS. The implementation was completed in 2016 and immediately provided TSC stores with a fast, easy to use POS application that is able to provide the fast thru put and features like mobile POS, that today’s retailers need.
No longer hampered by systemic restrictions of a legacy WINDSS system, TSC’s merchandising team began to focus on growing their customer loyalty thru a new and exciting marketing program that includes a variety of new sales promotions. The only unanswered question was what “tool” they would use to manage the program. TSC’s first priority was to move beyond their paper based card program which was difficult to administer. Furthermore, their legacy solution did not allow any tracking or reporting, which is a vital part of any marketing effort.
After an extensive review, RTC’s Customer Loyalty Rewards(CLR) solution was selected to provide the merchants the ability to create unique and targeted promotions and powerful marketing campaigns to drive sales in the Equine and Pet Food categories. CLR is a real-time points and rewards loyalty program that is designed to be simple to use and require little to no training for store staff. The solution supports the utilization of a customer loyalty card that contains a barcode. When the card is scanned, the POS sends a request to CLR and retrieves the club, point history and available rewards for that customer. The available rewards can be redeemed in the transaction and if they are not redeemed, they are printed on the receipt. With capital dollar spending always scrutinized at TSC, RTC was able to implement CLR under a new SaaS model, which allows TSC to have full access to the solution, on their box, with no capital license fees.
After several intense design sessions with the TSC team, the application was installed, configured, tested and deployed in a few months. TSC already had a pretty robust customer database, so their requirements for the solution were straightforward, the application had to be easy to train and deploy and simple for merchants to manage. The application had to be quantity driven with an uncomplicated redemption process and instantly provide the reward to the customer within the same transaction. Furthermore, the application had to be integrated into the POS and seamless to the customer.
Rewarding shoppers instantly, and allowing them to use their reward in the same transaction, builds excitement and increases customer satisfaction. TSC utilizes a (Buy x, get x free) model that is simple to manage for the store and easy for customers to understand. Customers build up the number of bags purchased and when the quantity threshold is met, the next bag is free is the driving message RTC received from TSC as the project started up.
CLR exceeded all their expectations. Six weeks after the implementation, TSC was able to sign up and or convert more than 6,300 customers and launch a total of 13 new clubs. “RTC offered us a solution through our POS systems in store that would allow for easy sign-up, tracking, reporting, and great flexibility to add clubs as the program grows, says Susan Ross Director, IT & Capability Building at TSC Stores. “We are very pleased so far, and our sales and margin are close to our expectations. Shoppers are happy with the program so far, and cashiers have found it very simple to sign up new customers. The RTC team is always great to work with! They were able to meet our tight timelines and we haven’t had any major issues since we went live in all stores. Having the program bolt onto our existing POS system has allowed us to create reporting and tracking to fully understand the return of the program and help to lay out next steps,” added Susan.
“Many retailers reward all shoppers the same, but those programs come at the cost of margins. At the end of the day, margin is what it’s all about”, says Jeff Cook Director Store Systems RTC. “If you can increase sales in a positive way, by rewarding your best and most loyal shoppers, while maintaining margins, that is a program you want to keep”, says Cook. “CLR gives the marketing organization more control and flexibility than they ever had to design creative targeted campaigns around specific product offerings and delivered a significant ROI”.
RTC is always looking for ways to help our chain retail customers reduce capital spending and increase overall operational efficiencies. Recently RTC helped longtime Canadian chain retailer Peavey Industries LP (Peavey), who operates 37 Peavey Mart and 3 Main Street Hardware branded country hardware stores in Central and Western Canada, launch a store POS “Virtual Server Farm” or “Virtualization” strategy across their enterprise to reduce hardware capital expense, operational energy costs, and ongoing server support costs, without compromising the reliability and security of the business. “Virtualization”, is the migration of one or more physical servers into separate virtual server environments on one single physical machine.
Like most retailers, Peavey had old physical POS servers located in each store across Central and Western Canada. Servers more than 4 years old can be a drain on an enterprise costing you in energy, cooling and even loss of productivity. The typical price tag for a new server is $2,500.00. Multiply that server cost by 40 stores and Peavey had a capital hardware cost of $100,000.00 to replace all their POS store servers. Furthermore, those 40 POS servers eat up a lot of energy over the course of a year and with Canada “enticing” everyone to go “green”, moving those 40 POS servers out of the stores and into the HQ data center in Red Deer, Alberta made a lot of sense.
RTC stepped in and designed a plan that would allow Peavey to remove the 40 POS servers from the stores and move them onto 3 servers utilizing two NAS components running all the virtual images and backups housed in their HQ data center. The 3 servers with the two NAS components cost a total of $12,000.00 in capital hardware expense. Further, the power consumption of 40 POS servers in each store was reduced by approximately 75% with the 3 new servers and NAS components running in the HQ data center. Finally, consider the cost reduction to technically support 40 servers located across Central and West Canada over 5 to 7 year life cycle now moved to 3 servers located on a rack in the Peavey HQ data center.
“It’s amazing how the migration to the new server farm was able to take place with no noticeable difference to the stores”, says Carolin Miller, the VP of IT for Peavey Industries. “Literally they were able to come in and start working the next day, with no apparent changes to their operations. Having the peace of mind of the built-in redundancy, and having the servers located in a properly conditioned and monitored environment will be undoubtedly be advantageous and appreciated by the IT team. This is another example of a job well done by RTC”.
“RTC was able to reduce store server footprints without sacrificing mission critical applications performance that drives a superior retail experience for the guest”, says Rich Gault Director of Network Services for RTC. “The server software controls and assigns physical hardware resources to each virtual server, so in essence, each virtual server thinks it is a physical server. Each store server is “backed up” in case the HQ server goes down or a network connection is disrupted. Each StoreMS POS register has its own copy of the POS server data on it to continue to operate as a POS terminal if and when the POS server is “off line” and also has connectivity to the payment card processor so payment cards can be processed as well. Software updates and rollouts are simpler, redundancy is built in, and the entire system requires less touches and far less time. If there is a corruption issue, the virtual server allows updates, loads and even rebuilds to be handled in the data center verses shipping hardware around or requiring visits to every store”, adds Gault.
“It doesn’t take a “tech genius” to comprehend the capital and operational cost reductions gained eliminating 40 “in-store” physical servers and replacing them with 3 data center servers housing 40 virtual store servers within them, the 75% power savings to operate them and the reduced man power to support them”, says Bruce Hicks President RTC.
