Browser based in store ticket printing

Harveys: A Case Study

Harveys Furnishing Group is one of the leading national retailers of furniture. The company operates approximately 150 stores trading as Harveys: The Furniture Store.

Following Harveys acquisition by Homestyle group in 2000, the company has updated its trading formats, introducing a greater element of contemporary merchandise within a more stylish shopping environment, intended to better reflect customer's aspirations. The Harveys business has a strong value for money proposition aimed at the broad mass market.

Harveys is Britain's most exciting home furniture store and successfully expanding its offering making it a premier store to visit for furniture.

Harveys was using an external supplier to generate the artwork and print the required POS ticketing for all the Harveys stores. For each promotion, the stores were receiving identical packs of ticketing and often received too many or not sufficient for their displays. It was estimated that around 30% of all ticket packs were wasted. The process from compiling the spreadsheets to delivery of the POS ticketing was manual and time-consuming and frequently gave rise to errors.

The stores have a facility to print emergency tickets for the last promotion only but this only allows a basic ticket, one per page, and did not satisfy the store's need for access to the whole range of tickets they may need.

With the introduction of net.tickIt web, the opportunity to use this architecture to print all their POS ticketing centrally for stores became a reality.

The business benefits are -

• Reduce overall cost of ticket production and dissemination
• Increase production efficiency
• Reduce labour costs
• Increase automation to reduce manual intervention
• Increase flexibility to react quickly to local or market changes

The net.tickIT web solution was introduced in early 2006 and rolled out overnight to all stores. Currently, the net.tickIT system uses the existing spreadsheet formats for all the product menu item details and associated price points. However, it is anticipated that automating the entire data capture, processing and execution by their new back office systems will be effective later this year. The solution allows all stores to access any released head office event and to select additional POS, build a print queue and print a range of ticket formats including menu lists of product families. The solution will automatically type set, allow proofing centrally and releases to store on a date effective basis. Harveys will have the ability to vary the price of goods in specific brand stores.

As the system uses central browser architecture, there is no requirement for any store installation. This means that new stores will simply 'plug and play' to receive their own ticketing issue.

 

"Having run the net.tickIT system for some time now, it is evident that our new ticketing system has lived up to all our expectations. The system was so simple to use that we only needed to issue a short training 'how to' guide to the stores and most importantly the turnaround from signing off the product offers to stores printing their ticketing is almost instant!"

 

The issues that have been addressed include:

• the error correction and proofing cycles
• the inaccuracies of the manual collation process
• the distribution costs and management of lost packs
• the inadequate facilities for ad hoc ticketing in store
• that stores can only print one ticket per page
• the inability of stores to access the full library of issued tickets
• the cost and time issues of the current process and of emergency ticketing