Bookseller Waterstone's has upgraded its Phoenix in-house stock-management, ordering and range-management applications so that it shares a common platform with sister company HMV.
The upgrade comes five years after the formation of parent HMV Media Group, which left Waterstone's with a hybrid stock- and order-management system in its 199 stores when it absorbed the Dillons chain.
According to project leader Nick Hudson, the primary driver for the upgrade was to improve operational shortcomings of the old system. The code that makes up the system is 90 per cent identical to the system HMV uses, allowing the companies to make savings on development and support.
The last 5 per cent comprises applications that are specific to the business model of selling books. The key improvement was building prompts into the ordering application that encouraged branches to review their ordering more regularly.
Additionally, the retailer wanted to build in a degree of central range management into the application.
'With the old system, we could classify each title as A, B or C, where an A classification meant every branch was advised to stock it,' said Hudson. 'Now we have a complex matrix of store and range guides for a much more tailored replenishment system.'
Hudson, who also worked on HMV's management systems, explained that the models for selling books and music were sufficiently different to preclude using exactly the same applications, but that it only took his team hours to tailor the core code to each retailer in the group.
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