CIPA awarded TELUS Mobility a Silver Award of Excellence for its Retail Management System (RMS), an application designed and implemented by Qualicom Innovations. Qualicom also served as the primary consultant in integrating it with SAP and other systems.

TELUS Mobility, a leading supplier of wireless voice, data and Internet services to 4 million business and consumer clients, supporting 120 corporately-owned retail stores, planned a significant expansion by 2007.

This expansion would not have been possible if TELUS had not chosen to upgrade its previous retail software. Store managers and staff handled inventory and sales transitions in systems separate from head office. Therefore, the possibility for errors was huge, and head office lacked critical inventory level information for its stores. TELUS needed a powerful new retail management system to upgrade both its clients’ retail experience and its staff’s work environment.

The new system needed to re-engineer and automate all store processes, ensure ease of use, and deliver productivity through a single access point for store staff. It also needed to enable centralized inventory, product and promotion management, incorporate other business applications in the corporate store environment, and include a POS framework capable of plugging in Web applications to integrate various payment options.

Qualicom’s design integrated Web and Java technologies to deliver state-of-the-art functionality to the stores. The POS application was a single-transaction workflow combining sales and returns. Input came from scanning product codes, serial numbers or receipts; transactions could be suspended, resumed, voided or paid by a mix of different tender types.

It also enabled offline transactions so that client support could be provided without having to connect to the central server. And unlike many RMSs, which required extensive modifications to support new requirements, Qualicom’s solution permitted any application to interface with the RMS solution.

The end result met or exceeded all of TELUS’s expectations. Employee churn is down significantly and annual sales growth in the stores is in double digits, compared with an industry average of three per cent. Since its roll-out in October 2002, the RMS has become the gateway application that is used by the Corporate Stores team every day.

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