Gerry Weber

Knowing the company
Gerry Weber International AG is an international, publicly listed fashion and lifestyle corporation headquartered in Halle/Westphalia, Germany. Gerry Weber sells its five brands, GERRY WEBER, GERRY WEBER EDITION, G.W., TAIFUN and SAMOON by GERRY WEBER, plus branded products such as shoes and bags across the world in 340 Houses of Gerry Weber, at over 1,800 stores and online.

Defining the strategy
During 2007-2009, the fashion company replaced its legacy POS system with Torex - today the international network of stores has grown by about 50 locations each year. The legacy system was no longer able to handle this kind of growth as it did not offer the required performance and scalability.

The company finally decided on Torex because no other product met as many of the key requirements. Besides high scalability, another big plus was the way Torex can map the specific store processes at Gerry Weber. Rather than rapid capture of data, the fashion company needed a system that optimally supports the stores' sales workflows, which involve a high level of consulting.

Choosing the solution
Gerry Weber has 340 stores, under the name Houses of Gerry Weber. Of these 142 are owner operated stores with the remainder being franchises. All houses work with Torex POS. Today all stores are equipped with integrated computer POS systems that include a touch screen and a keyboard. The company is currently upgrading the solution to ensure that each POS supports office, time recording, or other centrally installed applications via Citrix connection.

When Torex was introduced, it was connected to the Alexa ERP system from Salt Solutions using a standard interface. The EFT terminals for electronic payment transactions are also connected to the POS system. The Torex solution is operated on Gerry Weber's central servers in Halle/Westphalia, and data communication with the individual stores takes place via a VPN line. But in the event the connection is down, the houses can still work independently and carry out any transactions at any time as each store has their own database which is synchronised with the master system every night.

In-house as well as franchise store staff are getting along very well with the Torex solution. The IT department received positive feedback in particular from those employees who used to work with the old system. The system is clearly structured and well thought out, and all steps are easy to follow and learn. Torex made a few changes to the standard interface to implement specific requirements of Gerry Weber as regards, among others, staff rebates, return reasons, price reductions, and other special offers.

Gerry Weber will also implement another innovative IT project throughout the entire company within the next few months: RFID technology (radio frequency identification) to optimise logistics and retail processes; at the same time, this will provide the company with a new means of securing its goods. This will accelerate administrative workflows, reduce administrative workloads and do away with expensive post-processing steps related to the supplier.

By introducing RFID tags, the fashion company will gain a host of new possibilities, in particular for securing goods and inventory taking that are quite superior to customary barcode labeling using European article numbers (EAN). In practical terms, the company will sew RFID tags with unique serial numbers into all of the 25 million products it produces and ships every year. This electronic product code (EPC) will then be stored in the Alexa ERP system. Before the goods arrive at a store, Alexa transfers a list of the delivered items to the Torex POS system. After scanning the new goods, the POS solution receives the unique serial numbers of all new items via mobile data entry (MDE) and stores them in a back-office database. As a result, the store PC is always up to date on which items are in the store at any given time. When items are sold, the corresponding serial number is deleted from the database. Ceiling-mounted radio antennas at each store exit read the serial number stored in the tag and compare it with the Torex database, detect stolen goods and can raise an alarm.

Achieving return on investment
Torex provides Gerry Weber with a POS solution that offers extreme scalability. Due to the design of its database, the system can easily handle thousands of stores without loss of performance. Administration of the tool is also geared for growth. The Torex solution part of the RFID project plays a central role in securing goods as the POS system checks whether an item was sold or not. And when it comes to data protection, Torex is the most sensitive component of the RFID process chain: The solution is designed such that no association between the transaction and the chip can be made, even when customer cards are used - a truly secure system.