Mothercare has become the inaugural contract win for BT's new retail group, Expedite.
The group is primarily made up of the recently acquired UK assets of NSB, following a cash deal worth£17 million.
The contract is to replace Mothercare's IBM 4690 system, which runs DOS, with a PoS solution based on Micro-soft's .Net platform.
According to an Expedite spokesman, the system is intended to tie till points more closely with the supply chain and Mothercare's CRM programme.
Each till will be able to process customer orders and provide data for shopper queries in real time. The solution will also enable head office to run sales audits with much shorter lead times, which will help to cut till fraud.
The system will be rolled out to 1,000 PoS terminals across 250 stores. Mothercare refused to disclose the exact price of implementation, but it is estimated that the contract is worth about£5 million, and is part of a wider IT spend by the retailer of£15 million over the next three years.
NSB's 148 UK employees will form the bulk of BT Expedite, and BT will take on the management of NSB's existing UK retail customers. NSB's US parent will retain the rights of all its products, while Expedite will become its sole UK reseller.
In response to criticism that the acquisition is a departure from core BT strategies, BT Expedite chief executive officer Simon Scott said: 'ICT is a big slug of what BT does, so this relationship with NSB is not such a departure for us. A lot of systems will become communications-intensive.'
No comments yet