What is it?
Our Retail Management System (RMS) centrally handles all stock transactions while monitoring and controlling practically all aspects of a retail enterprise. Because it’s at the heart of the Retail Directions software platform, RMS enables retailers to drive a unified customer experience across all store locations, including their web stores.

What does it do?
RMS tracks and manages items, prices, promotions, stores, warehouses, stock levels, customers, employees, sales and profits. It collects all the accounting information and feeds it directly into the retailer’s General Ledger and other financial systems. It also detects fraud and helps in loss prevention. RMS also provides centralised control over store systems, including POS and mobile store devices.

What advantages does it offer your business?
Because RMS has been developed specifically for retail, it can be implemented without business blueprinting or extensive software configurations. In the key areas of your business, RMS natively supports alternative rules for retail business processes. This makes it easy to reconfigure for specific business requirements. This flexible approach allows for rapid implementation and easy changes at later stages, when business requirements evolve.

RMS has proven scalability. It allows retailers to operate multiple retail brands using a single RMS database, running thousands of stores with hundreds of thousands of SKUs and multiple barcodes. Core functional areas within RMS include: product management, procurement, stock management including auto replenishment and computer-aided stock redistribution, prices and promotions management, customer management, warehousing, merchandise budgeting, and loss prevention.

RMS also operates as an integral part of the omni-channel solution available within the Retail Directions platform, supporting order acceptance online or within stores, with fulfilment from integrated warehouse or bricks and mortar stores.

Warehouses in RMS operate in real time, using RF technology. The system supports advanced warehouse management functionality, with the entire supply chain being SSCC enabled. Stock can be delivered directly to your stores or to warehouses for storage, cross-dock, or break-bulk distribution.

Retail Directions’ platform includes an extensive set of sophisticated reports and interactive enquiries, as well as the SalesCube® tool.

Reports cover information such as sales, stock, customers, location performance, staff performance etc. A set of reports supports 6-sigma analysis, to assist in the detection of abnormal data patters that could be indicative of fraud or unstable business processes.

Enquiries provide access to various type of information, such as sales, stock, lay-buys, sale transactions, stock transactions and more.

SalesCube® gives you the ability to drill-down and uncover valuable data, providing interactive access to sales, gross profit and stock information at any merchandise level between SKUs and the total store sales. It allows for comparison against budgets, the previous year, or any nominated period. It replaces over a thousand traditional reports and enquiries.

The Quadrant Analysis tool available within SalesCube has prompted many retailers to change the way they do business. It provides a visual representation of how a division, product category or even an individual item performs in terms of sales and profit. It allows retailers to instantly recognise under-performers and make decisions about how to treat them in the future. By the same token, Quadrant Analysis identifies star performers that need a special stock replenishment policy to avoid running out of stock.

You can use our Executive Sales Tracker to gain live access to up-to-the-minute sales and target information relating to store trade.

This application can run on any smartphone. Mobile users (executives and regional managers) can be given access to the stores that are relevant to their area of responsibility.

What is it?
The RF-based mobile extension for the Retail Directions’ SMS (SMSmx) provides retailers with the flexibility of mobile computing on the shop floor. The SMSmx application runs on Windows devices as well as on iPads, and it links directly with SMS, the main store system.

What does it do?
SMSmx supports inventory functions such as stock-take, stock receiving and stock transfers, as well as customer-centred functions such as mobile sales, item, customer and gift card balance enquiries.

What advantages does it offer your business?
The SMSmx mobile solution improves staff efficiency and accuracy by providing access to the system at the location where transactions are taking place. SMSmx can also act as a queue-busting device, speeding up customer service at peak times.

What is it?
Our Store Management System (SMS) handles store-level functions: POS and store back-end including reporting, reconciliations, banking, petty cash, stock control, transfers, messaging, and time in attendance.

What does it do?
SMS connects directly to your head office’s RMS, using a message queuing system. This provides practically instant data exchange yet allows stores to continue operating without compromise, even when communications are down or slow.

What advantages does it offer your business?
Human Engineering principles drove the development of SMS, which was designed to eliminate the need to train cashiers. This reduces training and operating costs in the stores and prevents situations when untrained team members struggle to work with POS systems. Instead of trying to mould people to fit the machine, we have made the machine fit the people.

In our efforts to simplify the store system, we were able to eliminate time-consuming system housekeeping tasks. Backups occur automatically in real time to registers or the head office database. Store database administration tasks run automatically, and we have eliminated ’end of day’ or ’start of day’ batch jobs.

This means that you don’t need any computer skills within stores. Your frontline staff can concentrate on being great retailers, instead of frustrated computer operators.

What is it?
Our Advanced Warehouse Management System (AWMS) takes care of the logistical operations behind a successful retail business. It works seamlessly with the Head Office RMS system, POS/SMS in your stores, and Web Shop.

What does it do?
AWMS provides all the functionality you need to run an efficient warehouse operation in a retail environment, including store replenishment, customer order fulfilment, and potentially hundreds of thousands of SKUs. Its features go far beyond the capability of typical warehouse management systems:

• Centralised warehouse configuration management, including dynamic logical storage maps.
• Full inventory ledger with bin level tracking.
• Warehouse task management, combining centralised and distribution task allocation.
• Handling all inbound and outbound processes, including faulty store goods returns.
• Bulk picking for multiple stores during a single pick tour.
• Bulk picking of online and store customer orders.
• Stock pools for combined bricks and mortar and web shop stock management.
• Support for cross-docking and store-to-store transhipments.
• Support for break-bulk, to allow for pre-delivery allocations.
• Full support for unit loads in the entire supply chain (SSCC labelling).
• Wireless operations on the warehouse floor.
• Transport company integration with a number of carriers.
• Requisite reporting.
• Stock takes (full and partial).

What advantages does it offer your business?
Because AWMS works seamlessly with the other parts of the Retail Directions platform, there are no issues with integration, ongoing monitoring of interfaces or recurring data reconciliations. It’s not even plug and play – you simply turn it on.

Many retailers don’t like warehouses because they’ve found them painful to run. Some try to supply their stores directly while others rely on third parties to manage their warehouses. However, unless you run your own warehouse and do it well, someone else will extract profits that you could have been kept in the business.

To avoid the issues caused by running your own warehouse, you need just two elements: a capable warehouse manager and a robust warehouse management system. Your HR team will need to recruit the first, but we can certainly provide the second.

Our retail platform also includes an integrated Web Shop, which connects to the main database via a set of open APIs. This allows retailers who use third party web shops to also take advantage of the fully integrated platform.

Sales transactions made on the web are visible in the stores, to allow returns against the original sale. Gift vouchers can be sold and redeemed in on-line and bricks and mortar outlets, and the system maintains a single view of the customers.

Please note that some of the features available in the Retail Directions Web Shop cannot be used if a third party web shop is used e.g. Promotional Engine which also runs within the Retail Directions POS (SMS) system.

A natural extension of our Web Shop, the Mobile Web Shop automatically adjusts presentation to smartphone or tablet for a better shopping experience.

Just like all other components of the Retail Direction system, the Mobile Web Shop just plugs into our platform.