Bath-based fashion and luxury goods boutique Prey has installed Microsoft’s Retail Management System (RMS), launched only yesterday, with a view to expansion.

The solution, aimed at small- to medium-sized businesses, combines PoS, inventory management, pricing and promotions support, and reporting and analysis in one product.

According to Prey managing director John Sanglier, the main motivation for choosing Microsoft was the ability to expand the system to future stores and head office. ‘It should allow us to manage inventory across stores very easily, it’s key to what we are doing in the future,’ he said.

‘(Microsoft) is not particularly well known in the till space, but this didn’t cause concern,’ he added. ‘The distributor (Retail Realm) was very good and worked with us for two days (to get the product up and running).’

Sanglier was impressed by how well staff, who had never used anything like it before, took to the system. Shopfloor staff were soon using the tills to show customers future ranges on suppliers’ Web sites. Shop managers were also able to use sales data to generate reports on which lines were selling better than others.

Prey has used its RMS to run a promotion on perfume. The tills identified products automatically when scanned, and dealt with price reductions without the need to change barcodes on the items.