Project snapshot
When delays at the till began taking time away from City Plumbing’s customer-first approach, the company decided they needed to upgrade its legacy point-of-sale (POS) retail system. The till at City Plumbing includes Rocket Software’s UniVerse platform, which powers the company’s enterprise resource planning (ERP) system and has POS capabilities. Although UniVerse is considered a heritage tool, its core functions and vendor-agnostic integration capabilities make it an excellent starting point for building a scalable retail platform that’s ready for the future. UniVerse also assists with stock fulfillment, order management, finance, and other business functions.
Yet, City Plumbing faced limitations using UniVerse without modifications. Challenges included:
- Stock visibility
- Lack of integrated customer information
- Poor search capabilities
- Slow performance
- No cross-selling or upselling opportunities
City Plumbing investigated a commercial product but decided they needed a custom solution. After searching for a software development company that could design the modern POS it needs, they chose Intellias because of our decades of successful retail experience. Within six months, an augmented development team delivered a POS pilot to 80% of City Plumbing’s retail locations.
With a fresh, fast UI that connects to more data sources, the object data exchange platform running on AWS immediately improved the user experience for customers and associates. The new POS empowered associates with integrated customer details, allowing them to provide more personalized service. Despite initial resistance from associates, the UI quickly became popular. It reduced the time for onboarding new users, cut hours of customer service time, and sped up financial transactions. City Plumbing also gained better insight into inventory and improved their quoting process.
Based in Crick, Northamptonshire, City Plumbing employs over 4,500 associates at 360 locations across nine different businesses throughout the UK and Ireland. Part of the Highbourne Group, the plumbing, heating, and bathroom retailer uses many digital technologies to offer expert advice and supply products to plumbing professionals and DIYers.
Business challenge
When City Plumbing contacted Intellias, the Windows-based PCs at their checkout counters ran UniVerse. Although UniVerse is a capable retail checkout system, City Plumbing determined that they were no longer able to support the company’s growth and an increasing volume of eCommerce sales. With 2,600 users, City Plumbing’s system needs to serve 30,000 product views per minute and process up to 250 orders per minute, or about 5 million orders annually. Its B2B sales represent 95% of its revenue.
Associates used UniVerse to browse products and see usual prices. They could also look up customers and connect them to the right price in the system. However, the UniVerse system was not user-friendly, and the data was not unified. Payment processing could take minutes. Moreover, it took new associates six months to learn the POS system.
Over time, the usefulness of stored data also degraded. For example:
- Credit customers were sometimes assigned to cash accounts, while cash customers were assigned to credit accounts
- Many products were listed as stock or pricing exceptions, and some items were missing entirely
- Some eCommerce products lacked information or photos
- Users could bypass the POS to order items from the supplier outside the store’s catalog, resulting in unknown inventory
- Prices of some in-stock products could not be verified
The POS also included two pieces of hardware for payment and order processing. A portable electronic device (PED) accepts credit card payments and PINs, while a pad collects signatures for proof of payment.
To ensure the new platform meets business needs, City Plumbing and Intellias assessed the technology and developed a list of project goals.
- Save time at the till
After carefully analyzing the company’s existing services, our team found that web integration with physical devices was the biggest challenge. This caused many delays at the counter. To determine the amount of time spent at the point of sale, the company created an operational process team to measure how long each action took. The most time-consuming step was collecting signatures. In the worst-case scenario, the system could take 30 minutes to communicate with the signature capture device. - Eliminate price overrides
The legacy system was designed to be flexible about price management. Using a powerful administrative mode, associates could enter any price for any item, meaning that prices could be below the supplier’s costs. The company wanted to ensure that it made a profit from every product sold. - Centralize provisioning
When a customer wanted to order something from a supplier outside the normal catalog, a store associate could order temporary stock only for their branch. However, these items were not included in the product inventory management system. If a customer returned one of these items, it would become dead stock. As a result, 1.3 million pieces of inventory were not properly accounted for.
Solution
With the project details in scope, we used our decades of software development experience to create a new POS system for City Plumbing. Our engineers worked with the company to design a custom solution that solved bottlenecks, errors, and other concerns at checkout.
- Improved checkout: During the payment portion of the transaction, the electronic point of sale card connection (EPOCC) and transaction authorization code (TAC) took a long time to process. With the new POS, the processing time is a few seconds.
- Stable architecture: Using an object data exchange model (EODEM) on AWS, we created an eCommerce platform that supported three sales channels: the company’s website, mobile applications, and a GraphQL B2B API. Once the team was sure the platform was stable, they introduced it at the register in 10 locations for a trial run.
- Efficient order creation: Unlike the previous POS system, which treated every transaction like a special order, more than half of all transactions are now available through the new React UI without changing systems.
- Accurate pricing: City Plumbing had 21 ways to define a price, resulting in a complex and inaccurate pricing process. We reduced this to two pricing methods and created an accurate Java-based pricing calculator that standardized pricing across branch locations.
- Enhanced product search: Our engineers introduced a new centralized process for unifying inventory data with an Algolia search engine. Associates can use Algolia to browse the web with the same view as the customer. This includes order history, previous searches, and other information associates can use for cross-selling and upselling opportunities. Algolia also serves as an interim stock management system and allows associates to easily find stock at other locations before placing a custom order.
Business outcomes
Store associates and branch managers liked the new UI. After three months, City Plumbing decided to roll out the system to 110 branches. At six months, all 360 stores were on the new system. Within a week of the first rollout, associates were processing 80% of the retailer’s transactions using the new UI. One branch manager said she could use the system within 20 minutes.
In addition to being easy to use, the custom POS:
- Increased sales both online and at the counter
- Improved customer satisfaction with personalized service
- Reduced staff training and onboarding times
- Preserved core business logic
The modern UI immediately brought new opportunities. Data sources were aligned with web and mobile channels, and data silos were opened to integrate customer data with product availability. City Plumbing’s marketing department also created personalized promotions through the new UI, which improved selling activities at the point of sale.
Technologies used: AWS, Kafka, Java, Algolia, Microservices, React, UniVerse, StepOver, GraphQL APIs, Keycloak, Barclays payment
KPIs 39% revenue increase 60% increase in conversions 20+ enterprise customers retained