Cozy Arrangement

It used to take one Midwestern furniture retailer up to four days to design, proofread, revise, print, package and deliver signs to its stores. Now it performs the entire job electronically in five minutes — 10 tops, if some of the information requires clarification.

The RoomPlace, a Lombard Ill.-based chain with 24 showrooms in greater Chicago and Indianapolis, revamped its sign-making procedures a year ago with help from Episys, a U.K.-based vendor with stateside headquarters in Chicago.

“It saved time and increased accuracy,” Vesna Telalovic, the retailer’s vice president of merchandising, says of the transition.

Once product information has been entered into the chain’s IT system, buyers or assistant buyers simply enter a new price into the appropriate database: the Episys system automatically sends the new signs to printers at each store.

If a store manager needs to reduce the price on a certain item to meet a competitor’s offering, he simply notifies headquarters and the sign quickly appears on the store’s printer, says Linda Phan, the RoomPlace executive who managed the Episys implementation. The nearly real-time changes make life easier for sales associates, who no longer have to worry about the price at POS matching the price on the sign.

In short, the chain’s merchandisers have absorbed sign-making duties into their department, Telalovic says. That’s a significant step forward from the previous “broken process” that began with the merchandising department sending product information to the marketing department via e-mail: marketers mocked up the sign and merchandisers made corrections. Some signs required multiple visits among and between the two departments.

“The approval process was painful,” Telalovic recalls. Moreover, the merchandisers knew what they wanted the signs to say, but faced the task of conveying that information to the marketers.

Once those signs received the merchandising department’s approval, they were printed at headquarters, stuffed into envelopes and delivered by courier to the stores. Some signs completed the process in a day or two; others took up to four days.

Now the merchandising department is freed from proofreading and rounds of revisions, while the marketing department has saved time that it can devote to other tasks.

Episys writes all the software, obtains the hardware from its suppliers and takes responsibility for maintenance; it even supplies the paper, says Peter Lewis, the vendor’s vice president of marketing. “Quite a few retailers want to deal with one main supplier,’ he says. “Then, if they ever do have a problem, they don’t have to worry about [whether] it’s the hardware or the software … we’ll sort it out for them.”

Silent sales consultants
Signs can make all the difference in retailing; it’s no joke when retailers refer to the best placards on the sales floor as “silent sales consultants.” And they play a particularly important role at The RoomPlace, which strives to sell its wares by the roomful. Signs reinforce the chain’s recurring message that “the more you buy, the more you save,” Telalovic says.

Beneath that slogan, the signs tell customers the group’s name and price, what’s included in the group and the price consumers would pay for each piece if purchased separately. The signs also display the sum of the individual prices to reveal the savings enjoyed by purchasing the entire set.

About 80 percent of the signs at The RoomPlace measure 11 x 14 inches; signs for some smaller groups could run 8 x 11 inches. “Everyday” signs bear the blue and green of the stores’ logo, while beige predominates in signs for youth furniture.

Approximately 70 percent of the stores’ signs reflect prices established well in advance; the remainder are created on the spur of the moment in reaction to competitive pressures, Phan says. Company-wide sale signs are batched every other Friday and arrive at the stores a week before the sale.

“We don’t print waste,” Telalovic says. “That was hard to manage in the old system,” but now the store managers have a menu on their computer screens and can select signs only for the groups in stock at their stores.

Using inventory databases for individual stores, Episys can print only the signs needed at each store. In a case where a store might display a certain product in more than one location to maximize cross-selling, the system takes this into account and sends the correct number of signs.

An Episys feature that The RoomPlace is not using enables the system to tap into a store’s planogram and print the signs in the order that an associate would walk the store and place them. Doing so saves one U.K.-based home center chain 16 hours of labor per store each week, Lewis says.

Signs of the future
Episys also will link with the new Oracle IT system now coming online at The RoomPlace, Telalovic says. “We’re really looking forward to when Episys will eliminate manual creation of ‘out-of-stock’ signs and ‘available for immediate delivery’ signs.” Once Episys has access to inventory data, the system “will push those signs out to the stores,” she says.

In the future, The RoomPlace hopes to color-code the signs to let salespeople know how many sets the chain has in stock. A green box on the back of the sign might indicate a plentiful supply, for example, and the associate could schedule immediate delivery.

Installation of the Episys system can take a few weeks or a few months, depending upon the complexity of the operation, the hierarchy of stores and their geographic grouping, the depth and breadth of products and the number of template sizes, Lewis says.

Retailers pay an up-front price that varies depending on the number of stores and the modules involved, as well as a periodic retainer for maintenance.