Retailer toasts greater efficiency through streamlined services

Direct Wine Shipments is enjoying efficiency and productivity gains following the implementation of Microsoft’s Retail Management System (RMS).

The specialist retailer, which offers home delivery, tastings and wine courses, wanted to streamline its point-of-sale, ordering and stock control processes.

‘Our existing system was extremely slow, affecting processing of invoices, backing up through to retail point-of-sale,’ said director Neal McAlindon. ‘Data was often very hard to retrieve.

‘But the current system is very simple, particularly during point of sale.’

Direct Wine employs many part time staff over Christmas and the new system ensures training can take minutes rather than days.

Other benefits include customer profiling to target customers with certain products, wine club membership tracking, stock movement tracking and automated administrative processes to make staff more productive.

‘We can even put in-depth tasting notes into the system so staff that are not familiar with wine can simply read the information back to customers,’ McAlindon said.

‘The return on investment is primarily through time savings as the new system affects all aspects of our business,’ said. ‘The capital cost was reasonable and the support is also fantastic with any problems resolved quickly.’