 Hughes and Hughes is Ireland’s fastest growing and most dynamic book retailer with shops in all four corners of the country and the only Irish bookseller to expand into the UK. The company has twelve locations in Ireland, one in London city airport and most recently Hughes and Hughes has opened two shops at Terminal 5 in Heathrow Airport and employs 260 people. The company has implemented a €600,000 EPoS Merchandise Management System in line with a change in trading operation where they are moving to a complete central distribution model.
“We are moving to a complete central distribution model where everything is bought centrally, delivered centrally and fed to the stores from our warehouse”, explains Tony McEntee, Managing Director at Hughes and Hughes. “We want to have a single invoice point, single delivery point, reduced administration and the assurance that buyers need to make only make one buying decision. We also needed a system that would report instantly on what Hughes and Hughes is selling along with margin being generated ”.
Hughes and Hughes had previously used a retail system but found that it was not cost effective nor could it expand to keep pace with the company’s continued growth and expansion. “We needed a retail solution that was very user friendly and had a clearly defined development road map”, continues Tony. “The chosen retail solution had to benefit the business by providing sophisticated, timely and accurate reporting from the till and delivering an integrated end-to-end solution, which ensures the capacity of the business to react quickly to market conditions”. Hughes and Hughes selected Microsoft Retail Management System from Datapac because of Microsoft’s quality and Datapac’s expertise and knowledge of the solution. “We wanted a solution that is SQL server based which will integrate simply with our finance, logistics and other critical systems and is largely an out of box solution” says Tony.
Hughes and Hughes can carry as many as 100,000 SKU’s so stock control had been extremely difficult and time consuming. “Knowing our stock holding, which books are selling well, our profit margins and our supply chain, are all critical to a successful retail operation”, says Tony. As part of the solution, Datapac is implementing 50 IBM Surepos Tills to allow both the customer and sales assistants see the screen with product details. “The Surepos tills are single, 15 inch touch screen box units which will allow people in store know what is in the stock file and they will be able to access directly into the websites to pick up on titles that we don’t stock and allow them look for specific customer requests. They can place orders and take deposits against specific customer orders”, says Tony. “The solution will also give us a powerful promotions module so that when we run a wide range of promotions with full trackability and reporting facilities. It will also integrate card payment and gift card management directly through the Hughes and Hughes system which will eliminate using handheld pdqs’. This eliminates error and certain levels of potential fraud along with improving our efficiencies in reconciling our cash”, continues Tony.
Datapac is building up a core suite of reports in the solution and Hughes and Hughes will use these as reference reports allowing all other reports to be cross referenced back to these. There is a functional report writer within the system which will allow Hughes and Hughes staff to develop skills in this area.
“We now have online real time information. We are more responsive to sales trends and can manage our stock to maximise the return on investment for the whole business”, says Tony. “Trends emerge quickly particularly in airport retailing and we can now react to that by running a replenishment in the warehouse at lunchtime specific to each unit within the airports based on sales over the first four or five hours in the morning and replenish what we sold in the morning by mid afternoon and have it there for the rush in the evening”. The laborious element of generating replenishment orders with pens and lists has been removed. “All the information required is in one place and made instantly accessible” continues Tony. “At the touch of a button, I can assess how the location/unit is performing, pinpoint the performance of just one line, one supplier, or one store. Alternatively, I can ask for any combination of these. I can find out about our stock levels in about ten seconds, find out when a particular book came in, how well it is selling, what our top selling books are, what lines are slow moving or fast moving and ,most importantly, it enables us to identify key product lines where improvement of yield or maximization of sales is important".
“The real benefits of using the solution are the ease of use of the system and its speed of response”, says Tony. We are now making critical buying decisions based on full knowledge of our stock usage and sales”.
The next phase for Hughes and Hughes is to include a loyalty scheme linked to people’s transactions which will identify personal shopping patterns. Hughes and Hughes will then develop the e-commerce site. “Datapac really knows the retail business well – we were impressed with their speed of response, flexibility and business expertise”, concludes Tony. "Hughes and Hughes is now fully prepared for its continuing success and growth with a solution that can evolve with its needs " .
June 2008.
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