“We immediately recognised that the AURES range had a solution for each of our selling environments. The SANGOs so far deployed have proved to be reliable and have performed well. The rollout has been welcomed by staff who noticed the improvement in response times and transaction throughput.”
Philip SKILLEN, IT Manager, Housing Units
Manchester-based home department store Housing Units has never been a business content with sitting on its laurels. The modern-day giant department store located just off the Oldham Road in Failsworth can trace its origins back to 1947, and the opening of a small DIY and woodcuttings store in the nearby village of Hollinwood.
Over the years, the company expanded its focus into furniture, home and garden utensils and accessories, fireplaces and a broad range of building materials. As the business grew, it found it needed more space to be able to stock all the products its customers were asking for, so two more stores were opened in the 1970s and the 1980s.
Then, in 1991, Housing Units as it is now known to hundreds and thousands of customers across Greater Manchester was born. The three stores were merged into one giant, purpose-built complex, and the business took the decision to discontinue DIY and building products in favour of focusing all of its attention on the home furnishings market.
Manchester’s premier home department store has been a roaring success ever since. Over the past three decades, not one but two new stores have been built on the same site, dedicated retail departments for fireplaces, kitchens, bathrooms, flooring and carpets, furniture outlet and nursery and kids goods have been opened, and the complex has been graced not only with a cafe but also the highly regarded and very popular Wickentree restaurant.
All of this ambition and enterprise has not gone unacknowledged. Housing Units was crowned the UK’s No 1 department store two years running, in 2010 and 2011. And still the company strives to keep moving forward, to stay one step ahead of home furnishing retail trends, investing heavily in the latter half of the 2010’s in a revamped home shopping eCommerce offering and also in its distribution facilities.
The Challenge
Keeping up with rapid developments in technology has become a key priority for every type of business, and in retail nowhere is this more pressing than at point of sale. While retail chains have raced to adopt networked EPOS solutions which centralise management of sales, inventory, accounts and more across multiple different sites, department stores are presented with a different set of challenges, as Housing Units’ IT Manager Phillip SKILLEN explained.
“Although we are a single site retailer, we have a wide range of sales offerings, from big ticket furniture, service orders for bathroom and carpet installation, pick up and go plus cafes and a restaurant,” said Phillip. “We currently run the same POS units throughout our estate as this gives us the flexibility to move kit around and swap as required. While this has worked well for us from a service availability point of view, it means that we are not creating the best possible fit of device for each environment.”
As the company’s existing fleet of EPOS terminals started to age, Phillip and his team recognised that getting the best out of point of sale across such a diverse retail environment would mean abandoning a one-size-fits-all approach. What Housing Units really wanted from its EPOS assets were bespoke solutions tailored to the needs of each of its different sales environments. That was a key reason why it turned to AURES.
The Solution
“We first met AURES at a NavPeople user day about two years ago and very much liked the range of kit it has to offer,” said Phillip. “We immediately recognised that the AURES range had a solution for each of our selling environments. We also recognised that the AURES approach to product build and maintenance was one that we wanted to adopt.”
Given the scale of the project to upgrade all of its EPOS endpoints, Housing Units opted to take a phased approach. As the first priority was to replace its legacy hardware, the company decided to start by rolling out a general-purpose terminal across key sales areas to boost
performance and reliability before looking more closely at customisation for different needs. For this first phase, it chose the AURES SANGO.
“We have started with the SANGO as a good general sales POS unit and we are looking at other models to provide a suitable look and experience in different sales areas,” said Phillip.
While the ultimate goal of upgrading the company’s EPOS systems is to provide a better customer experience with tailored point of sales solutions in each environment, Phillip said the SANGOs had already brought a range of other benefits to the company and its staff. “The SANGOs so far deployed have proved to be reliable and have performed well,” he said. “The rollout has been welcomed by staff who noticed the improvement in response times and transaction throughput. The SANGO units are lighter and easier to access than the kit they are replacing so the systems team like them too. We see them as very good value for money.”