Tag Archives: RTC

Summer 2017 Newsletter

RTC Completes Planet Hollywood Store Systems Upgrade to StoreMobile POS at All US Retail Stores & Celebrates at Launch of Flagship Disney Springs Location

Planet Hollywood (PH) launches RTC’s next generation store system StoreMobile POS at the grand re-opening of their flagship location, Planet Hollywood Observatory at Disney Springs.  The RTC team was on hand to celebrate the accomplishment with Rich Olgee Vice President Corporate Controller at PH, Steve Gargano Director of Internal Controls at PH, Michelle Marr Retail Manager PH, Tiffany Seidule Controller at PH, Bruce Hicks President RTC, Brian McWhirter VP Store Systems RTC, Jeff Cook Director of Store Systems RTC and Lee Williams Marketing Manager RTC.  Read More

 

Summer 2017 Newsletter

SeaWorld Agrees to Outsource Data Center Operations with RTC as Part of Major Technical Upgrade Initiative

In late 2016, SeaWorld approached RTC to develop a cost effective plan to allow them to relocate their server systems from a third party data center and upgrade system speed, memory and responsiveness.  SeaWorld’s decision was predicated on RTC’s ability to manage all aspects of their data center operation remotely and cost effectively.  As a leader in data center hosting and remote data center services with over 20 years of experience hosting retailers such as Margaritaville out of Orlando, Florida, Petsense out of Scottsdale, Arizona, and At Home out of Dallas Texas, RTC was well positioned to support SeaWorld in their Orlando Data Center.

SeaWorld currently relies on RTC for JDA® MMS® Support Services, which includes responsibility for all MMS Consulting services, so expanding the relationship to include the iSeries was a natural fit.  RTC managed the entire upgrade initiative including the purchase and installation of a new iSeries box, the systems OS load and migration, as well as the “go forward” back-up and recovery strategy.  The initiative was a complete success.  The entire transition was seamless with little to no interruption to business activity.  In a little more than 45 days, RTC completed the “Go Live” and SeaWorld was on a new Power 8 box.  Furthermore, RTC was able to allow SeaWorld to end their existing contract with their current hosting provider and significantly reducing the monthly costs associated with the third party datacenter.  Going forward, RTC will remotely manage all the day to day systems administrative activity on the new box.

Summer 2017 Newsletter

RTC Launches Virtualized Point of Sale (POS) Server Farm at Peavey  – Cutting Hardware Costs in Half and Reducing daily Power Consumption by 75%!!

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, 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.  RTC eliminated 40 “in-store” physical servers and replaced them with 3 data center servers housing 40 virtual store servers within them, reducing Peavey’s hardware costs and power usage by 75%.  Read White Paper

Summer 2017 Newsletter

TSC Grows Sales by “Stepping Beyond” Paper Based Loyalty Card Program with RTC’s Customer Loyalty Solution

 

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…

 

 

Summer 2017 Newsletter

Vail Resorts Buys Whistler Blackcomb & Leverages RTC Experience in the Establishment of New Canadian MMS Environment

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.

Summer 2017 Newsletter

RTC Dominates in the 2016 RIS Software Leaderboard

For the fourth year in a row, RTC is celebrating an outstanding showing in the RIS Software Leaderboard.  Retailers continue to rank RTC as one of the premier software vendors in the North America.  RTC thanks our customers for your valuable business partnership in 2016.  From RTC’s perspective, to be included in the annual Retail Information Systems (RIS) survey is a significant achievement in itself when you consider that retailers from across North America and Canada select the best 99 vendors based on a combination of retail concentration, revenue and customer satisfaction.  For the past 4 years, our rankings have exceeded all expectations.

  • RTC Ranked #1 for the second year in a Row in 7 Categories including Customer Satisfaction, Quality of Support and Quality of Service
  • RTC Ranked in the top 5 in ALL 25 Categories
  • RTC Ranked in the top 3 in 24 of 25 Categories

These results are a testament to our hard work and commitment to our customers which is “The RTC Way” and your recognition of the value it brings to your business.  This includes development, support, consulting services, operations, and the management/admin team of RTC.  If you look at the diversity of categories in which we did well, you will recognize this is the result of the efforts of the entire organization.

See Full Report Click Here

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RTC Completes First Phase of Ecommerce Reserve Initiative as TSC Stores Canada Continues Omni Channel Transformation

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.

 

Summer 2017 Newsletter

TSC Grows Sales by “Stepping Beyond” Paper Based Loyalty Card Program with RTC’s Customer Loyalty

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”.

Summer 2017 Newsletter

RTC Launches Virtualized Point of Sale (POS) Server Farm at Peavey  – Cutting Hardware Costs in Half and Reducing daily Power Consumption by 75%!!

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.

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Thoughts from the President! RTC Off to Blistering Pace for the First Half of 2015, as We Continue to Add Mid-Tier Retailers to Our MMS & Store Systems Portfolio

Halfway through 2015, and RTC has seen its busiest year since before the economic downturn.  We have signed several new Store Systems & POS deals and entered into three significant agreements to take on MMS operations, software development & maintenance, as we continue to grow our customer base in supporting JDA® MMS® retailers.  Our consulting and ASP Hosting Partnerships continues to expand, so we have had to bring on additional MMS consultants to meet the growing demands as retailers look to increase inventory visibility to accommodate their Omni Channel plans.

Retailers continue to see value in our MMSxTend Solutions, especially our – Warehouse Optimization RF, Replenishment and Allocation modules.  Furthermore, RTC is once again at the forefront of the “Mobile Revolution” with our StoreMobile Inventory applications providing retailers the real time functionality they need to fulfill in today’s retail environment.

 

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Planet Hollywood Retail Store Systems take Center Stage as RTC’s StoreMS POS and StoreMobile Inventory Replace Aging Micros POS System Chain-Wide

Working with a 20 year old Micros POS system that was never meant to run a retail operation, Planet Hollywood was faced with a tough choice given they had already committed to replacing Micros with Aloha’s Restaurant POS software on the restaurant side of the operation.  For many years Planet Hollywood has had limitations regarding its retail POS and inventory management systems capabilities.  These limitations have been felt from the store operation to the warehouse and throughout their merchandising and accounting systems alike.  Given the prospects of more the same with the Aloha Restaurant POS system, Planet Hollywood turned to its long time JDA® MMS® ASP partner, RTC, to finally solve this problem.

RTC was given the chance to prove what it could do by installing its StoreMS POS, StoreMS Mobile POS and StoreMobile Inventory MMSxTend application in the Planet Hollywood Disney Hollywood Studios store back in January of this year.  With RTC’s suite of store systems up and running, the Planet Hollywood Disney store now has complete control of its retail operation including real time visibility of all retail inventory regardless of the location it resides in including the warehouse,  “on order” and “in transit” inventory.  In addition, inventory can be viewed on any PC, phone or mobile device logged onto the Planet Hollywood network both in the store, at the corporate office or from a mobile device in any physical location!!

Store personnel productivity and inventory control problems are resolved and rolling out the RTC solutions are all that remain.  Planet Hollywood is committed to rolling out RTC’s StoreMS POS suite and StoreMobile’s applications in all its retail locations.  The first phase of the upgrade began with the two Orlando Florida locations and will extend to the remaining stores.

Rich Olgee,  Vice President Corporate Controller at Planet Hollywood  Int.  says, “we are very excited to continue our long standing partnership with RTC. Their complete suite of store systems is the answer to Planet Hollywood making our retail operations more efficient in regards to inventory management, customer experience, employee performance and overall reporting needed to manage our retail business. We look forward to the complete roll-out to all of our locations in the near future.”

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RTC Completes 360º Nickelodeon European Store, Warehouse & MMS Install – in Just 4 Months

RTC was recently selected by Entertainment Retail Enterprises (ERE) as their Store Systems and JDA® MMS® partner for the launch of their new flagship store under the Nickelodeon brand.  Up front, ERE executives laid out an aggressive 4 month plan to open the first European store in Leicester Square London, one of the busiest foot traffic areas in the world.  The project included a full scaled 360º front to back implementation of JDA®’s MMS® System and a full Store Systems deployment including StoreMS POS (with mobile) and StoreMobile MMSxTend for complete store visibility to inventory.  In addition, RTC would integrate MMS to a 3rd party warehouse in the UK and install their MMSxTend Warehouse Optimization module.

To further complicate and strain the timeline, a completely new credit /debit certification was required to certify StoreMS-POS on the new Verifone EMV Chip & Pin platform.  Typical new store installations take a minimum of six months, when you add the complication of this being an international location and implementing JDA®’s MMS® with a third party warehouse from the ground up and the timeline could easily have stretched to 7 or 8 months.  In the end, RTC was able to leverage our store systems expertise and JDA® MMS® consulting services group to overcome a significant number of challenges and still meet the expectations of the client and get the entire retail operation up and going in just 4 months!!

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TSC Stores Canada Signs Mega Deal to Outsource the Bulk of Their IT Shop to RTC and Replace WinDSS POS Chainwide

TSC Stores, a Canadian owned and operated retailer with 52 corporate stores, recently signed a “mega deal” to have RTC outsource the bulk of its IT operation.  This all-encompassing deal includes RTC taking over responsibility for all MMS operations (ASP), software maintenance and development and further leverage RTC’s suite of MMSxTend applications.  While TSC has already leveraged several of RTC’s MMSxTend applications including StoreMobile and Warehouse Optimization over the years, TSC is considering adding RTC’s Advanced Replenishment & Allocation modules, in the near future.  With the Corporate retail systems operation now in the hands of RTC with the management and guidance of Susan Ross, Director of IT for TSC Stores, TSC then turned its attention to its biggest remaining IT headache, which is their legacy WinDSS POS store system.  Susan and the TSC Executive Management team was not shy in turning to RTC to solve this problem as well.

Given JDA® “sunsetted” WinDSS POS several years ago, TSC has continued to fall behind in the industry with regard to the limitations of its legacy store systems capabilities.  The result of these technical limitations prevents TSC from making simple POS changes needed on an ongoing basis and enhancing the POS system with advanced features such as Mobile POS and Inventory Management from one device.  These systemic restrictions continue to inhibit TSC’s retail store operation from making technological advancements that are proven to increase its customer service levels given the state of store systems technology available today and had to be overcome.  TSC turned to RTC to implement its StoreMS POS and StoreMS Mobile store systems knowing that its store systems suite of applications has a reputation of being fast, easy to use, easy to modify and supports mobile POS within its core POS application.

“In my time working with RTC, we have found them to be a strong strategic business partner and consider the RTC team an extension of our own. We are looking forward to rolling out the new StoreMS POS and continuing to build our relationship with RTC”, says Susan Ross,  Director, IT & Capability Building at TSC Stores.

With the first pilot store scheduled in late August, TSC is looking forward to overcoming the current systemic limitations and gaining a technological advantage within its store operation.  TSC has noted the ease and efficiency of using StoreMS POS, its advanced Sequel database design, as well as the integrated mobility built right into StoreMS POS making it agnostic to typical POS hardware as well as a wide variety of mobile devices.  The expected net result is an increase in customer services and satisfaction.  Look to our next newsletter toward the end of the year to highlight the results of our StoreMS POS implementation within TSC Stores as the rollout begins in September.

“As a long-time customer of RTC, TSC Stores is one of the few customers that we have actually worked closely with in building two of our core MMSxTend applications, so we have intimate knowledge of their operation over a long period of time.  That was a critical factor in stepping in and providing the level of outsourcing from MMS to store systems at TSC that we are now responsible for.  I am very confident that this partnership will not only stand the test of time, but will ultimately provide TSC with a competitive advantage”, says Bruce Hicks, RTC President & CEO.

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RTC’s Rankings Continue to Soar in RIS Software Leaderboard

Retail Information Systems (RIS) News released its annual Retail Software LeaderBoard in December, and RTC was once again well represented.   RTC’s Store System Suite of Products and MMSxTend Solutions ranked #1 in Three categories including Quality of Support, Quality of Service and Leaders in recommendations.  Furthermore, RTC ranked in the top 5 in all 27 categories among a group of 99 other retail software vendors.  RTC finished #2 in seven categories including Leaders in Customer Satisfaction, Leaders in Return on Investment, Leaders in Software Reliability, Leaders in Quality of Service, Leaders in Quality of Support, Apparel Vendor Leaders in Customer Satisfaction and Targeted Solution Vendors Leaders in Customer Satisfaction.

The RIS Retail Software LeaderBoard, commonly referred to as the “Oscars of retail technology,” ranks an ever-changing field of retail software vendors based on three main criteria: customer satisfaction, revenue, and retail concentration. The survey also ranks vendors in 40 breakout categories. LeaderBoard results are based on retailer surveys and vendor forms.

“RTC consistently provides excellent support and always maintains a sense of urgency in responding to any issue  or problems.  They are a true “partner” in participating in discussions and recommending cost-effective business solutions,” says Joe Skorupa, editorial director of RIS News.

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