On the Go

J erry Kohl knows when to say goodbye to a certain type of technology. The old cash register is a great example, he says.

“If you talk to the people in the stores using cash registers, you’re going to see that ... everybody other than the Apple Store thinks their software isn’t user friendly.”

The Apple Store changed the world, Kohl says. That’s one of many reasons why Kohl has introduced mobile solutions in Brighton Collections, his chain of fine goods accessory stores.

“What an owner of a store hates more than anything is the clerk who stands behind the counter and yells across the room, ‘can I help you,’” Kohl says.

Those machines the clerks are standing behind require software that cost upwards of $25,000 but retailers continue to use them because they don’t want to change programs. Furthermore, he says, retailers have been slow to adopt Apple’s model, where workers float throughout the store with handheld POS devices.

“Three years ago, I walked from vendor to vendor at [NRF’s BIG Show] and said ‘I want to get something like Apple has,’” Kohl remembers, only to hear, “‘Oh, no. That’s never going to work. It’s not secure. The data won’t work and blah, blah, blah.’ Of course, we knew Apple’s data was secure — otherwise, they’d be all over the front page of The Wall Street Journal.”

Kohl began working with KWI to implement a mobile POS solution that has stock movement and inventory functions as well as real-time inventory access across the entire chain.

“Jerry Kohl is constantly shopping other people’s stores, looking for that customer experience,” says Sam Kliger, CEO of KWI. “He came to me and said, ‘My goal is to have the Apple experience in my stores for holiday 2011. What do we need to do to get it done?’”

Now each of Kohl’s Brighton units have two mobile POS devices. And three years after Kohl began searching for a mobile solution, the market has reacted; several retailers are rolling out mobile POS solutions from multiple manufacturers.

Despite the many innovations in the category, however, Kliger says few large-scale retailers have mobile POS running in their stores. Brighton was able to roll it out so quickly and effectively, he says, because it wasn’t tethered to a POS system.

“We didn’t have to write an interface to their current POS system... We didn’t have to worry if the local hard drive failed on the point-of-sale system that the mobile point-of-sale was going to stop working,” Kliger says. “All we had to worry about was the KWI infrastructure.”

Mobile data
Kliger says the challenge of using mobile POS is the information sourced from the store’s local database. What happens if the local database didn’t get updated because the polling didn’t work, the download didn’t work or the register is down?

“If a buyer forgets to do a price change in the system the day before, Kliger says, “none of the stores have that download.”

Some companies are going back to the old days of local POS and investing in interfaces and infrastructure, he says, spending millions on new mobile solutions but tying them into the same sluggish system.

“With our solution in the cloud, the second anybody changes anything in the back office system, all of the stores are instantly changed,” he says. “If I want to deploy software, new updates to these devices, I can change them remotely easily. … It’s time that retailers rid themselves of all of this hardware technology that they’re installing in their stores and realize that in order for them to be much more profitable, much more streamlined, much more efficient, the cloud is now here and it’s going to be here ... for a very long time.”

“Cloud” is among the industry’s top buzzwords, but it doesn’t mean much to Kohl. The benefit of mobile POS, he says, is getting associates out from behind the counter to interact with the customer in the store.

“You want to give service to the customers. You want to be with them in the store wherever they are,” he says. “So, if you’re looking at a handbag in my store, why do I need to be at the cash wrap? I can be standing next to you and be talking to you about the product as they’re [being rung up].”