Latest News - Ponden Mill Demise Presents Opportunity for Other UK Retailers
Vodat delivered an innovative solution that provided all the information that Edinburgh Woollen Mills required, without the need to replace the Ponden Mill tills.
The uncertain economic times that we all face can seem worse to those organisations operating in the retail environment. When a retail company fails, it tends to make the news more than is the case for other sectors of the economy.
Late in 2007, homeware retailer Ponden Mill was in this sorry situation when it was placed by its owners into administration. Fortunately, although the Ponden Mill name will no longer live on many of its stores have been saved, by being sold to other retail operations.
The major beneficiaries of this sale, Instore and Edinburgh Woollen Mill (EWM) are both long-term customers of Vodat. So on acquiring the stores, immediately contacted us about integrating their day-to-day operations into their Vodat-managed communications network.
Integration with existing network
Mike Bielinski, CEO of Vodat said, "The integration of the Ponden Mill stores into Instore and EWM's estate presented us with 2 different but interesting challenges that allowed us show our expertise and knowledge of the retail world."
Instore had bought 33 of the Ponden Mill stores with a turnover of £21.8M. They wanted to quickly combine the operations of these stores into their Vodat managed network which incorporated VoIP. This task proved relatively straightforward as they were replacing the ageing tills within the stores. But the EWM integration was a little more circumspect.
For the stores they acquired, EWM did not want to replace the existing tills straight away, but they still obviously wanted to receive the daily sales information. This presented us with a challenging problem as due to the age of the tills they could not communicate directly over a modern Broadband network with EWM's system and also the till manufacturer did not plan to upgrade this particular model.
Innovative solution
We managed to come up with a solution that provides all the information that EWM requires, without the need to replace the Ponden Mill tills. Motorworld, another of our customers used these exact same tills so we approached them and they agreed to carry out the nightly poll of the tills on behalf of EWM and transfer the information directly to their head office. This combined with the experience of the IT manager at another of our customers meant that we were able to set up a system that polled and translated the information in a format suitable for EWM.
Commenting on this innovative solution, Mike Bielinski said, "This unusual and very cost-effective approach demonstrates the skills and knowledge that we have of the retail world. We were able to get two of our customers to help a fellow (non-competing) retailer to quickly integrate new stores into their existing estate. While this was a quick-fix, it no doubt helped EWM recover their investment that much quicker whilst they were moving to their long-term solution."
For details about our fixed cost managed communications networks for retailers, visit VIP Retail or call Vodat International on 0161 406 1820 or contact us by e-mail.
Added: 19/11/2008 14:22:23
