Matalan has completed rollout of Retail-J POS, EFT, Chip & PIN, Store Back Office, Estate Manager and Sales Audit to its entire store estate. The POS deployment is the first ever on a Linux-based operating system and marks a shift in retail technology towards open systems standards. Retail-J’s platform independence and ability to run on older hardware has allowed the company to re-use much of its existing estate of IBM tills.

The clothing and homeware retailer’s previous store system had reached the end of its life and was unable to meet the requirements of Chip & PIN or support many of the more complex business processes needed to improve store operations. Combined with frequently inaccurate management information, such as sales, inventory and staff performance data, the business case for replacement systems was compelling.

Working with Capgemini as technology services and outsourcing partner, Matalan searched the market for a new store system. As well as supporting reuse of the IBM tills and deploying a platform to support both immediate and future requirements, improving the customer service experience instore was critical in Matalan’s evaluation.

"By choosing Retail-J we have not only saved an estimated 40% on the legacy architecture, but Retail-J also gives us greatly increased power to respond quickly to today's fast-moving retail world, and enables us to run more effective promotions tailored to specific needs," commented Nick Beighton, Chief Information Officer.

"The implementation of Retail-J is an important step in reducing queue times and helping to enhance the whole customer experience of shopping at Matalan," continues Beighton.

Estate Manager gives administrators online access to the company’s store systems from head office. At Matalan this suite of central applications has been deployed on a clustered server architecture running Sun Solaris, BEA Weblogic and an Oracle 9i 64 Bit database to handle the large transaction volumes. In stores however, a MySQL database and Linux operating system provide a performant and cost-effective solution.

Estate Manager is also used as a consolidated central feed into Matalan’s central merchandising system, PMM from JDA. The retailer is now evaluating additional functionality from Retail-J such as loyalty and CRM.

About Matalan
Matalan is one of the UK's leading clothing and homewares retailers offering quality fashion and homewares at up to half the equivalent high street price. Matalan now trades from 5 ½ million square feet in some 186 out-of-town stores across the UK. Shopping at Matalan offers outstanding quality at prices that are simply unmatched elsewhere. By buying direct from the manufacturer and having convenient out-of-town stores with low overheads, Matalan is able to offer unbeatable value for money. Further information on Matalan is available at www.matalan.com.

About Retail-J
Retail-J was formed in 2000 by a team of leading retail systems architects to develop a modern, integrated and network-centric suite of in-store and central applications for medium and large-size retailers. Using the Java 2 Enterprise Edition open platform and standards, the Retail-J system offers true on-line retailing, greater functionality and resilience, giving retailers lower cost of ownership, flexibility and choice. Retail-J software is distributed in the UK, Europe and North America through a network of specialised dealers. For more information about Retail-J, readers can visit the company’s web site at www.Retail-J.com.

Interviews, photography and further information are available from Tony Hammond.

Retail-J
Tel: 01992 538074
tony.hammond@Retail-J.com

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