Background

The Paint Shed are a Scottish multichannel retailer, supplying to both Trade & Retail customers via their website, telephone orders and 11 retail stores.  They are the cheapest source for trade and masonry paint, varnish and wood care products, specialist and designer paint, as well as a huge range of accessories. See http://www.thepaintshed.com/ for details.

Brief

Sage 200 financials and commercials modules were already in place to process orders from the website and mail order channels. Remote access was available to the retail stores to process shop sales. However, the Sage SOP system relied on a fast and stable broadband connection to head office. Sales order screens were slow to navigate, in an environment where fast customer throughput and customer service is important. Additionally, lack of support for retail POS hardware such as thermal receipt printers and cash drawers created additional challenges. The Paint Shed also had aspirations to roll out a customer loyalty solution across web and retail channels, as well as a PCI-DSS compliant integrated card payments system.

Solution

Working alongside The Paints Sheds’ Sage 200 Partner, Thom Micro Systems (TMS), Elite implemented the Sage 200 POS solution, initially into a pilot site. Elite POS has now been deployed across 22 tills in 11 branches, with further sites planned in 2018.

As well as using most of the standard retail and trade functionality in Elite POS and its integration to Sage 200, The Paint Shed also have also enabled new trade account creation at the point of sale, quotations and taking payments on account; all of which feed to and from Sage 200 in near real-time. The need for a reliable virtual private network back to head office has been replaced with a simple DropBox solution for true off-line working at the point of sale.

Testimonials

Jonathan Bowie, Managing Director at The Paint Shed comments:

“We approached our Sage 200 partner, TMS, to provide a POS solution that addressed a number of issues with the existing SOP system at our retail shops. Internet and VPN connectivity at our stores has always been an issue, so we needed a system that still integrated fully with Sage, but also had the ability to work when internet speeds slowed or dropped completely. Our SOP system was also quite slow to use in the shops. A fast, easy to use system would allow us to serve customers quicker and errors would be reduced.

Elite POS was demonstrated to us at TMS’s offices and it was immediately obvious that the system would bring many benefits beyond addressing our immediate issues. After the pilot site was installed, I had the confidence to quickly roll out to all other branches.

Since installing Elite POS, our staff are able to serve customers so much faster. Wildcard style searching allows users to find trade customer accounts and products instantly. A till transaction can be typically be completely in less than a minute. The system is very intuitive to use, so minimal staff training is needed and errors have been reduced by locking down functions such as refunds and discounts to manager logins.

The POS Manager dashboards allow managers to view real-time store performance from any PC using a web browser, without the need to login to Sage 200.

Support with TMS and Elite has been fast and efficient. As TMS also look after our Sage 200 system, we only have to contact one supplier for support and system changes.

We have been opening further branches in early 2018 and the rollout process to add the POS to these sites is simple and takes less than a day”