Expansion Scenarios

Dave owns a bicycle sales and repair shop. He hired Jess to help him fix bikes and make sales, but Dave manages the store operations himself. Because he’s often alone in the store, working on bikes and taking care of product management and inventory between customers, he only needs a single workstation.

Dave uses the Serialized Products version as it’s important for him to manage the serial numbers of individual bicycles and e-bikes.

Lee owns a small convenience store. She has three employees who split the sales shifts between them while she is generally in the back office taking care of products and inventory. Each employee has a separate user ID for security purposes and to track sales.

Lee uses the General Merchandise version of Retailarc Independent, with a single POS workstation in the storefront connecting to the Store Manager application in the back office. She prefers this setup as that is where she manages her business from.

Jackie owns a clothing store in a busy retail mall. She started with the single-lane version of Retailarc but found that line-ups at the counter were not manageable at peak times, so she ordered another POS workstation from Qualicom.

Qualicom configured the workstation for her and shipped it out. All Jackie had to do was unpack it and plug it in. It automatically connected to the Store Manager and she was able to cut into those line-ups instantly. She’s looking forward to adding a third checkout lane.

Jackie uses the Fashion Products version as it enables her to easily define and track sizes, colours, and styles for the products she sells.

Jackie’s business model proved successful: her clothing store was doing so well that she decided to open another one in a different mall across town.

She installed another Retailarc Independent system in the second store and hired a manager to supervise the operations of each. For now, Jackie is content to spend the bulk of her time at the new store, bringing her manager up to speed, and visiting her flagship store a couple of times a week.

She can start to see the potential advantages of centralized control of her stores, but for now her current setup meets her needs.

The Space Place is a mid-sized retail chain that sells space-saving solutions for the home and office. A few months ago, they had three stores with three instances of Retailarc Independent. But as they looked toward the opening of the fourth store, they realized that managing them separately was not going to be practical for much longer.

So they upgraded from Retailarc Independent to Retailarc Enterprise. This enabled them to monitor and manage the sales, inventory and financial positions of every store from head office, or any other location. And as the POS functionality was identical, they didn’t have to retrain their staff or lose any of their initial investment.

As The Space Place doesn’t have an in-house IT department, they opted for the hosted version of Retailarc Enterprise. Qualicom takes care of all the operational tasks, such as hardware maintenance, backup and recovery, while The Space Place has secure access to their data from anywhere using the RIS web application.

Be A Sport is a sporting goods store that originally used the hosted version of Retailarc Enterprise. Two years ago, however, they were bought by a large outdoor retailer, Active Pursuits, whose aggressive business model led Be A Sport to expand to 16 stores across the country.

For them, the decision to move to the in-house version of Retailarc Enterprise was based on a number of factors. They wanted to protect their investment in equipment and training. The math made it an easy decision: for the number of stores they now had, it was more cost-effective to purchase the Enterprise Server than it was to continue paying the monthly hosting fees. And as Active Pursuits already had an IT shop, it was not difficult to bring it in-house.

At the same time, Active Pursuits realized that Retailarc Enterprise was a more effective system than they had in their own stores, so they decided to consolidate them. Several custom features were required to support their joint business model and integrate with their SAP back-end. Qualicom’s expertise in systems integration enabled Active Pursuits and Be A Sport to implement a single system that met all their needs at an affordable price.