Torex™

Torex supports sustainable retailing

Recent years have seen a significant rise in consumer awareness of the environmental impact of their buying habits and the business activities of the brands they purchase. Consumers are frequently putting pressure on retailers to act more sustainably and are basing their purchasing on the environmental provenance of a product as well as its cost and quality. Government and Councils are also forcing retailers to consider environmental issues.

Technology has a major role to play in helping retailers meet their sustainability objectives, at a pace that best suits them and their business plans. Incorporating sustainable ways of working into the business doesn't have to involve costly or dramatic changes.

By enabling retailers to implement and monitor sustainable initiatives, technology solutions can be crucial in ensuring that the initiatives both enhance the customer experience and improve the bottom line. Retailers benefit from increased customer trust and loyalty, and increased profits as a result of reducing inefficiency and waste.

Torex works with the world's most forward-thinking retail, hospitality, grocery, petrol & convenience brands to entice, engage and retain their customers. Our solutions enable companies to meet their sustainability objectives through unparalleled insight into their business and innovative technology used to track, respond to and profit from sustainability initiatives. We are committed to giving our customers access to advances in technology and working practices and the expertise they need to make their operations and business processes as environmentally friendly as possible.

Our retail solutions can:

• enable cashiers to record whether customers re-use their bags at the point of sale, and award loyalty scheme points accordingly. (Torex™ Retail POS)
• increase the number of paperless transactions by offering the customer the choice of a traditional printed record of the transaction or an electronic version, accessible by email or on a specific website. (Torex™ Retail POS - formerly Torex™ Retail J-POS and Torex™ Retail POS (Business Edition) - formerly Torex™ DRS-POS)
• enable retailers to better manage stock, reducing both unnecessary transportation costs and the associated carbon footprint, creating a more smartly-stocked warehouse, and delivering additional productivity gains. (Torex™ Merchandise Planning - formerly Torex™ Compass-SCM)
• give retailers the power to quickly identify potential areas of waste within the business, such as stores that are consuming more energy than others, allowing managers to more effectively target improvements. (Torex™ Business Analysis)
• drive better demand forecasting and improved product planning, meaning fewer excess products produced, fewer initial resources to manufacture the products, less packaging and reduced transportation costs. (Torex™ Merchandise Planning - formerly Torex™ Compass SCM)
• automated shutdown of PCs, workstations when not in use after a period of inactivity (Torex™ Retail POS - formerly Torex™ Retail J-POS and Torex™ Retail POS (Business Edition) - formerly Torex™ DRS-POS).

Proof points

49% of the UK's top 100 retailers are in the process of making 'significant' changes to their businesses to make them more environmentally sound (Martec, IT in Retail, 2008-9). Most retailers are currently focused on 'quick wins' like plastic bags, energy-saving light bulbs, reducing packaging, removing trucks from the road and combining with other retailers to deliver to stores.

A recent survey conducted by MORI found that 44% of British consumers have rejected a product on ethical grounds.

Environmental concerns have influenced 75% of UK consumers to make changes to their lifestyle. 62% of consumers identified using less packaging as the most important action retailers should take. (PriceWaterhouseCoopers, “Sustainability: are consumers buying it?” June 2008).

Leading food retailers - Marks & Spencer, Waitrose, Tesco, Sainsbury's and Asda - occupy 5 of the 6 places in a poll to find the UK's greenest brands. (ImagePower Green Brands survey, 2008).