CASE STUDY ability to reduce the size of our cash desk . We ’ re now planning to have just a small cash desk area where there ’ s a printer and a cash drawer . And effectively the store staff are just using it for banking product because they can sell the product and take the payment anywhere in the store . The training element is brilliant , the fact that we can have a new sales agent start within the business and we hardly need to train them on the solution is amazing . We can drop it into a new store and it just works .
What trends are you seeing in the UK retail space and how does this affect your Digital Transformation journey ?
One of the things I ’ m really keen on is innovation and we ’ re trying to follow suit with a lot of the more forwardthinking technology retail brands . If you compare us to one of the big technology stores , they are fully mobile and I ’ m trying to follow their lead and be at the forefront from a fashion retail perspective . I like to keep on top of what it is that technology retailers are doing and where they ’ re heading to try and give us a bit of a steer on where we should be going . One of the key factors for me when I ’ m looking at any solution is how mobile it is , how easy it is to use and what it looks like – is it attractive to our staff and can they engage with it .
What are the next steps for Crew Clothing – how do you predict you will evolve from a technology standpoint ?
As a business we ’ re continuing to grow . We ’ re opening new stores across the UK . We ’ re considering various international markets and we ’ re also building on our channel partners . From an IT perspective , we ’ re trying to understand how to deliver that business growth and strategy . From the Couchbase PMC element , the key things that are on our radar at the moment is we put the original solution in just to take card payments , but now we ’ re trialling the cash capability and also integrating our gift card solution into it .
The next step moving on from there is to integrate the web sales experience with the store experience . So , it ’ s all about integrating our Couchbase database system with our website database to make sure that they ’ re talking to one another .
What best practice advice would you offer to those in a similar position before your work with Couchbase commenced ?
I would say consider the integration with your backend systems and spend some time looking at the nuances of that . One of the biggest pain points of the project was having to introduce workarounds with the new
system to meet the restrictions that our old legacy systems couldn ’ t . So , for example , take the real time element of the Couchbase platform ; we still have a little bit of a lag at the moment because our old system can ’ t ingest the data quickly enough so we have to schedule it . So we are on a 15 minute delay at the moment but the premise is that we will improve those legacy systems to allow us to get more real time .
What ’ s been the biggest lesson you ’ ve learned since your journey with Couchbase began ?
I ’ m amazed at how quickly we ’ ve been able to deliver this solution . The fact that we ’ ve been able to do it within 12 weeks and do events from inception to delivery and then move on to a store-based function has been absolutely amazing . I can ’ t fault the delivery of the product or the solution . p
ONE EFFICIENCY HAS BEEN THE SPEED OF
CUSTOMER TRANSACTIONS . WE CAN PROCESS
CUSTOMER SALES A LOT FASTER THAN PREVIOUSLY AT APPROXIMATELY HALF
THE SPEED .
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