Grace Shoes & Handbags

Grace Shoes and Handbags is the only UK wholesale outlet for a number of Chinese manufacturing companies. Grace has over 50 years combined experience in manufacturing high quality shoes and handbags and distributes these to the whole of the UK and Southern Ireland.

Grace stock over 100 ranges including women’s and children’s shoes as well as purses and handbags. They have three sites throughout the UK; two retail stores based in Bolton and Altrincham, and a wholesale branch in Manchester.

The Reason For Change

Initially, Grace Shoes and Handbags traded from their wholesale branch in Manchester. The business accounts and sales were done manually and were becoming increasingly inaccurate, inconvenient and time consuming.

As the business expanded there were plans to open two new retail outlets and due to the growth of the business, Grace decided they needed an EPOS solution to reduce their manual workload and become more efficient through the use of IT within the company.

Grace Shoes and Handbags needed a system that would be able to manage multi-site sales through a single system, and also needed the ability to trade in both retail and wholesale modes. Style colour and size matrices within the EPOS system were also a priority for Grace because of the industry in which they operate.

The Solution

Whilst looking for an EPOS solution, Grace considered more than six EPOS systems, including Microsoft RMS, but found that KCPOS was the best option for them due to the fact that each KCPOS till could be set up to run in either trade or retail mode, unlike Microsoft RMS which can only run one of these options across the system.

A week after the decision was made to implement KCPOS; Grace opened a new branch and needed a live till to be implemented sooner than expected. One of the KCPOS experts attended the new site to import all of their stock and get the system live. Within two days, the new branch had a live till, meaning they could immediately begin trading.

KCPOS was then implemented at the remaining sites, with one till in each branch. Two of the tills were set to operate in retail mode; the third was set to operate in trade mode for their wholesale branch. The tills were all linked and integrated with the accounts system at head office.

Before KCPOS was implemented, employees at Grace Shoes and Handbags had no experience of using IT within their business; all of their processes were carried out manually. This resulted in them having a server implemented in their head office, along with multiple PCs and other IT hardware throughout their branches. These was also linked together and fully integrated with their new EPOS solution.

Benefits

KCPOS’s stock control is extremely beneficial to Grace as it allows staff members to see exactly how much stock they have and exactly where that stock is located- something that was virtually impossible before the installation of KCPOS.

One of the main reasons Grace chose KCPOS over other systems available was because of its ability for the trade option to be defined per-site and not per-company. One of their sites is able to operate in retail and another can operate in wholesale-increasing efficiency and catering to customer needs- something that the other solutions could not offer.

The Future

Grace Shoes and Handbags are now looking to expand further and open more branches throughout the UK. KCPOS will aid them in doing so, as the system allows for new branches and tills to be added seamlessly as and when they are needed. Grace would also like to integrate an Ecommerce website into their KCPOS solution. This option is future proofed as KCPOS allows for integration with an Ecommerce website.