Company Profile

A leading retailer of award winning home and tableware products.

Challenge

The client’s retail point of sale system (POS) had not kept up with the company’s fast growth. It suffered from slow response times, intermittent downtime and was no longer able to support the quickly growing sales volume. In addition to long delays at the checkout, staff were unable to locate out-of-stock items at another store and customers had difficulty returning items to a store different from the one in which they were purchased. Prior to considering a Lean Six Sigma Solution, a more expensive option from their existing hardware supplier was considered. This involved spending hundreds of thousands to replace POS registers and to add more bandwidth to improve response time. Declining this offer, the client undertook to use a Lean solution to solve their existing problems.

Solution

• A cross functional team was assembled and an initial assessment was carried out.
• Lean Six Sigma tools were used to identify root causes of bandwidth problems and server downtime.
• Hardware was reconfigured and process changes were developed to permanently eliminate issues.

Results

• The client saved hundreds of thousands in new hardware to upgrade its communication network and point of sale registers.
• Customer sales levels dramatically improved ineach of the company's retail locations.