They are now able to instantly access the entire the customer journey on their mobile devices, from product look-up to delivery and payment. One of the first initiatives was to give in-store sales staff the ability to see and amend sales orders from the back-end system simply by accessing the POS from anywhere, on any device. In the case of Bohus, Neptune Software's Digital Experience (DX) platform provided the low-code, agile development tooling to quickly create API-based integration between the back-end systems and a cloud-based POS from retail specialist EINR. With the cloud this is incredibly simple to achieve using APIs and it means your business can take real-time, even automated, decisions. What matters more is the ability to get this data to where it's valuable in a ‘publish and subscribe' approach. Clearly there needs to be a master data view, but replicating data locally for the POS, or trying to make the POS a master data store, invites unnecessary complexity. The key to this connectivity is to create APIs that extract the data and logic from the underlying applications, such as ERP, warehousing and CRM, and combine it with the real-time data from the cloud-based POS. We realized we already had the data and logic across our existing applications - we just needed a better way to connect it to our stores in order to innovate. If you are looking for new digital capabilities they aren't likely to come from an all-encompassing POS system. It was the need for this level of flexibility that last year led Bohus, Norway's largest furniture retailer, to replace an aging POS system with a cloud-based alternative. Furniture retailer Bohus adopts a cloud-based POS If you want your employees to be mobile, to be able to serve customers and process a transaction from a tablet on the shop-floor, all you need is a network connection over WIFI or 4G. Then if you want to open a new store quickly, it won't be the deployment and delivery of your POS that slows you down. You just need a POS that's fast and effective at processing customer orders, whilst connecting in real-time to a master data view of that transactional data in your back-end systems. Many POS systems try to replicate all of that data and back-end functionality locally, but you don't need lots of bells and whistles here.
Increasingly it needs to receive and make use of that data, for example to enable click-and-collect, operate loyalty schemes or deliver CRM insights to store associates. Serving today's digital consumers means that the POS doesn't just send data back to the business. Especially in these days when rolling out new omni-channel capabilities such as click-and-collect can mean the difference between being open for business and not trading at all. That's fine for general business intelligence to inform top-level decision-making, but is very far from adequate for today's digitally-driven retailer. But does your Point of Sale (POS) system measure up to this? Traditional POS systems are designed to push sales data up to HQ from the store in hourly or daily ‘batches'.
Accurate, complete data that's available when and where you need it is the life blood of a modern retailer.
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