When you have more than one store (whether it is your own store or of a franchisee) and one or more warehouses, managing your enterprise centrally may be required. Shoper 9 HO fulfills these requirements.
What can you manage centrally? Since reporting and control are best managed when the same SKU (stock keeping unit/item code) and categories are used uniformly, you can define these at the HO and have them flow to the POS locations. Other masters are also supported, including price lists, promotions, discounts, customer & supplier lists and taxes.
Keeping in mind that connectivity can never be 100%, the data architecture is de-centralised. This means that each store has its own local database, and these databases are replicated at the HO. One additional advantage this design brings is that you have two copies of the database - this will come in use in case of a disaster and no backups are available at the stores!
Data transfer between POS & HO is via the Internet and several methods are supported depending on the local connectivity conditions – each store can employ the connectivity that suits it the best. This data synchronisation can be scheduled to happen at regular intervals - even this can be controlled by the HO.
All decision support is available centrally at the HO and you get access to over a 100 reports that you can take across stores & groups of stores (grouped any way you need to).
When you need to add another store, Shoper 9 HO supports rapid deployment - you can bring up a store to full operation in about half a day. Specific store settings and configurations can be copied into a template and deployed at the new store. All master information can be automatically pulled in from the HO.
HO supports centralised management of indents from the store, generation of consolidated Purchase Orders and integration with warehouses for dispatches.
Budgeting:
Shoper 9 HO supports you with basic retail sales planning. You can set the plan based on Quantity/Value or both for a store location for all the months in the year. For the same store you can fine tune the plan based on the product mix the store has.
You can track the sales plan vs actual based on the level of planning you have set.
Housekeeping:
Shoper 9 HO offers you utilities from diagnosing issues, correcting issues and re configuring system setting as per business changes.
Though Shoper 9 HO stores data on a sql server database, you could manage many of the sql operations like database tuning, data backups within the product. You could also manage clearing old log files within the product.
If a store data goes down for whatever reason, you can still send the store data from your head office to your store to continue operation. You can still continue without a store data backup. On the contrary there is flexibility for you to allow store backup to be restored at the store location and resynchronize the information.
If you are a single store, options to backup, restore, compact databases , database tuning are available to you within the product and you do not need to install third party software to manage your store database.