US. The Paradies Shops is adopting new IBM SurePOS 500 point-of-sale systems to help improve operations and enhance customer service and checkout time at its hundreds of airport stores, IBM announced this week.
The new touch-screen IBM POS systems are part of Paradies’ transformation of its entire operations to a new host-based system supporting merchandising, distribution, financials, inventory control and point-of-sale across the entire Paradies company. At the heart of that system is an IBM eServer pSeries.
The Paradies Shops has approximately 325 speciality stores in 59 airports in the US and Canada and is the exclusive merchandise licensee of the PGA TOUR Shops, Brooks Brothers, CNBC News, the Big Ten Conference and the Atlantic Coast Conference.
“Our goal for a new POS system was a powerful, reliable, networked system that could easily allow our store employees to quickly process transactions,” said Paradies director of information technology John O’Hare.
“It was very important that the POS systems be retail-hardened for the constant use in an airport environment. The easy, touch-screen interface also allows us to reduce training time for new employees.
“We had seen how rugged and dependable the SurePOS 500 has been in the food service industry, where employees are pounding it all day and where labour turnover and training are challenges,” he continued. “We knew that if it could survive in the food service business, it could take care of our requirements.”
In order to speed up check out processing in the airport – similar to a fast-food environment – Paradies’ sales staff using a touch-screen SurePOS 500 can touch a “hot key” for a combination or particular fast-selling product (such as bottled water or a newspaper), and the system automatically calculates the total.
Another major benefit of the new networked POS systems is the way it can help collect and report sales and inventory data back to Paradies headquarters in Atlanta. Prior to rolling out the new, networked POS systems, for example, Paradies had to employ one person fulltime for 10 hours a day to collect and compile sales data from its 11 shops in Nashville airport. With the new system, it takes that one person approximately two hours a day to complete the sales audit process.
“The new system has reduced the number of products we must mark down, and now we are replenishing products based on what we are actually selling, not on what we thought was selling,” said O’Hare.
