DEICHMANN

Knowing the company
No other shoe shop in Germany has been as successful as DEICHMANN in expanding their business over the past few decades. In 1913, Heinrich Deichmann established his first shoemaker's workshop in Essen-Borbeck - and within 96 years, the business has grown into an international corporation with 2,700 stores in 18 European countries and the US. In Europe, 3,115 Torex POS systems are used to scan and sell the company's goods day after day. The POS stations all work according to the same principle and are extremely easy to operate - and this is one of the secrets of DEICHMANN's successful internationalisation.

Defining the strategy
DEICHMANN's business model is founded on efficient organisation and attractive prices made possible by purchasing large quantities of stock straight from the manufacturer. DEICHMANN has a great number of stores, most of which have a single POS station. For this reason, it is important to maintain a harmonised hard- and software landscape throughout Europe. All shoe stores throughout Europe report directly to company headquarters in Essen-Borbeck, which is also where central merchandise scheduling takes place, as the individual stores do not order goods on their own. As a result, DEICHMANN does not require a storebased merchandise management system, but instead relies on a compact, cost-efficient POS system that offers many functions and directly communicates with the central ERP solutions. Another prerequisite is that new employees must be able to use the system without lengthy training.

Choosing the solution
The shoe discounter has been employing the POS solution from Torex with great success for many years, using it as a pure POS system with a few add-on tools that provide functions for stock taking, statistics and deposit/disbursement. DEICHMANN uses a version of the Torex POS solution tailored to specific company requirements, including a customised user interface run on a Linux® derivative from Red Hat®. Torex POS offers many new functions that DEICHMANN needs as part of their further international expansion, including features related to tax law requirements, language support, various rounding rules and many more. In the future, the company will need to support the steadily growing tax law requirements of different countries, and the new version will provide the functionality to take care of precisely that.

POS system implements various fiscal regulations on an international level
In concrete terms, this means that the POS system used in an international context must fulfil the finance authorities' requirement to document turnover taxation in a comprehensive and tamper-proof manner, thus preventing data manipulation and tax fraud. Each country has its own list of requirements. In order to implement these fiscal provisions in a POS system, the transactions relevant for taxation must be encapsulated on the software side, which is precisely what Torex POS does.

With regard to payment transactions, the system can also handle country-specific requirements, such as those of Denmark and the Netherlands, where - contrary to common practice - the POS does not issue commands to the terminal. The Torex
solutions further stands out due to its ability to implement the different rounding rules applied around the world.

Achieving return on investment
One important aspect of a multi-lingual POS system is that it must support Unicode, which is needed to properly display Cyrillic or Japanese characters. As another valuable Torex POS feature, DEICHMANN will be able to enter context-sensitive translations on screen, rather than having to maintain unwieldy Excel® tables as has been the case in the past.

The translators work directly at the POS terminal, so they can immediately check whether the translation is comprehensible and readable on the foreign display. Thanks to this, even untrained staff will be able to operate their POS terminal in any store throughout Europe intuitively after just a few minutes. This is important since DEICHMANN has thousands of employees but no fixed cashiers, so an intuitive POS system featuring local language support is a must.

"The result: Within just two minutes, every employee knows what buttons to press to start a standard cashier operation. This allowed us to reduce employee training expenditures by an amazing 80 percent. And this is exactly what we need when opening new stores in faraway countries, since we don't have the capacities on site to perform lengthy staff training," says Karsten Schütt. The Torex solution already supports 20 languages at DEICHMANN, and further ones will be added in the course of the following years, including Spanish in 2010.