Beall's Prepares For The Future And Delights Shoppers With Point-Of-Sale Technology From SAP

SAP AG recently announced that Beall’s, Inc., of Bradenton, Florida, a family-owned casual lifestyle retailer, is ready to leverage the latest retail trends, improve customer experience and meet future payment regulatory requirements after installing the latest version of the SAP Point-of-Sale (SAP POS) application.

With its legacy POS software and hardware at end-of-life, Beall’s needed to upgrade systems in its 450 Beall’s Outlet and Burke’s Outlet stores. The company chose to look at solutions that would support future customer experience initiatives, as well as payment regulatory requirements for payment card industry (PCI) and Europay, Mastercard, Visa (EMV), a global standard for credit and debit payment cards based on chip card technology already in use in international markets.

“We feel that it is important to have a technology infrastructure that can carry us through the future,” said Dave Massey, senior vice president and CIO, Beall’s. “SAP POS allowed us to upgrade to a more effective system while supporting both EMV and point-to-point encryption, a feature that provides exceptional security for sensitive customer data during the transaction process. In addition, SAP POS provides a number of new user exit and extension capabilities that allow Beall’s to expand the solution capability for our future needs.”

Beall’s previous POS system was costly to maintain and limited in functionality, making the shopper experience cumbersome at times. By replacing it with the 2.3 version of SAP POS, Beall’s can process transactions faster and leverage new marketing and customer relationship management capabilities. It also has an improved graphical interface, allowing Beall’s store associates clear guidance throughout the transaction. Previously the POS associate interface was limited to two-line text displays without graphics. Now the new system has an intuitive touchscreen POS client with built-in browser technology that makes it easy for employees to provide a superior customer experience.

SAP POS offers low total cost of ownership with inherent flexibility. It helps drive down operating costs and improve agility by allowing staff to quickly modify pricing rules, apply new discounts, add promotions and incorporate sales tax rules. The application is popular among Beall’s employees and customers and adds to the positive shopping experience. The returns authorization feature helps reduce complexity of merchandise returns while the smoother, faster process has helped improve customer service and reduce frustration. Due to the successful deployment at Beall’s Outlet and Burke’s Outlet Stores, the company plans to update its Beall’s Department Stores division in the near future. For more information, visit SAP Newsroom (http://www.news-sap.com/).