Price Changes in a Flash

A common challenge for retailers selling heavily-promoted items is the need to change signage and in-store price tickets the instant they find themselves being undercut by a competitor on the identical item.

This had become particularly problematic for Jessops, the U.K.’s largest photo retailer. “We are in a very price-competitive market and it seems to be getting more competitive every day,” says Brian Linnington, Jessops’ marketing director. Therefore, in 2006, management of the 240-store chain decided to implement an automated store signage program.

Jessops’ stores needed “the ability to change prices and promotions, sometimes daily, to make sure we were competitive,” Linnington says. “And obviously, if you are doing that, you need to send out traditional point-of-sale materials to highlight your prices and to have signs changed in stores. That manual process, however, can get complicated – plus, it costs you a fortune. We just couldn’t carry on any longer in that way.

“We needed to find a way to be very tidy and neat and very efficient in our stores, changing our prices when and if we needed to,” he says.

Jessops selected an out-of-the-box configurable solution from Episys, a global information technology company with dual headquarters in London and Chicago. Retail Enterprise Suite can be used to drive informational content from centralized databases to a variety of output media, including paper signs printed in-store, hand-held mobile devices and electronic signage.

Episys “had the flexibility and the IT and people resources to support us,” Linnington says. “Inevitably, as you roll out any new system chainwide, it will work first time in some of your stores, and in others you need to work harder to make it work. Episys was very good about supporting our training, especially in helping store-level people understand how our store printers worked with the system.”

Web-downloadable format
Sitting above and interfaced with the databases of a retailer’s in-house systems or enterprise resource applications, the Episys software pulls content like price changes and product benefits into a web-downloadable format configured to each retailer’s specifications.

There are simple rules in the system that produce the information that the retailer wants to put onto price tickets or store signs, says Greg Galstaun, vice president of business development for Episys. For example, a retailer may configure the system so that whenever there is a price change, it automatically produces a price ticket to support that change.

If a retailer allocates products to some stores but not to others, the system can be configured to send price tickets accordingly. The same holds true for companies engaged in zone pricing.

And “if a chain can give us planogram information, we can also print tickets in their planogram order, so a clerk can lay them out in the order they follow when they work the store,” Galstaun says. One of Episys’ retail clients reported saving an average 15 hours per week per store by having the price tickets laid out according to the order of the planogram, he says.

With the Episys system, retailers also have the capability of printing tickets right on the shelf using hand-held devices and wireless printers. If a sign is too large to be printed in house, Episys will send a PDF of the sign to a local printer of the retailer’s choice.

Details about product benefits are drawn from the Jessops product database. Through its database interface, the Episys software can populate the appropriate content on each store sign. The Episys software also interfaces with Jessops’ centralized product price database.

Spring rollout
After a short pilot, Jessops rolled the Episys system out to the entire chain last spring and has “been enjoying the benefits ever since,” Linnington says.

Jessops used to send out small signs and price tickets once or twice weekly. The new system is easier to manage and to implement “because the stores no longer have to wait for parcels that come in during the middle of the day, usually with a large number of price tickets and signs that have to be put up quickly.”

Linnington estimates the total net savings from the system at approximately $200,000 a year. “It is a much faster, more efficient process,” he says. “There has been a sound return on investment.”

Jessops uses the Episys system to print peg-end signs for items that are blister-packed, as well as signs placed beneath every item on display, carrying prices and details about the basic benefits of each camera.

After six months of using the Episys system chainwide, Jessops has learned to be “smarter in our marketing. We’re going to start using the system to be positive in our marketing rather than just to help us solve the operational problem of changing our price signs efficiently and neatly.”