Irish home entertainment retailer multichannel management IT migration enables multichannel business

Irish home entertainment retailer multichannel management IT migration enables multichannel business

Xtra-vision, one of Ireland's best known home entertainment brands in the movie and games rental sector, is using centralised retail management software to grow its business and implement a ‘click and collect’ service.

With 186 stores, Xtra-vision has successfully entered into the consumer electronics, music and games trading markets, as well as adding additional product lines, such as mobile phones and confectionary, to its offering alongside the real-time online purchase and instore collection functionality.

Centralising diverse retail systems

The company had a number of retail applications in place to manage different areas of the business. But the supporting system, which ran across head-office, point-of-sale and warehouse, was limiting the visibility of product movement and payment status.

Xtra-vision found that the cumbersome systems were unable to support new product ranges or complex transactions involving multiple currencies and channels. In looking for a retail management system capable of supporting digital as well as bricks-and-mortar retailing, it adopted ab-initio software from Irish retail software and multipoint retail information systems provider, Celtech.

Enabling multichannel customer offer

Seamus Quinn, business systems manager at Xtra-vision, explained that following an extensive evaluation of existing systems on the market, Celtech's ab-initio offered a real-time centralised data architecture.

"We chose ab-initio to help us maximise visibility and responsiveness across our head office, point-of-sale, warehouse and customer touchpoints. We have also recently gone live with our real-time click and collect service,” confirmed Quinn.

"The system is already providing us with an effective, fully-centralised management solution as we expand into new markets and customer channels,” he added. “At the same time we have been able to cut down distribution costs by 25% and created a reduction of more than 20% in labour costs.”

Tony Keating, deputy chief executive at Xtra-vision, said: "A single centralised database or repository that is updated in real-time, by all participants and at all customer-facing touchpoints, is a huge benefit to the business."