TM Lewin will go live with Prologic’s CIMS software at its head office in September, in the first phase of an enterprise-wide implementation.

The men’s fashion retailer is spending£1.7 million on replacing systems across its business. The EPoS application is due to go live by March 2008 and it will upgrade its mail-order system in the next few months.

TM Lewin finance director Mike Trotman said that the investment was needed to support the pace of growth in the business. He expects the software to pay for itself through operational improvements that will increase like-for-like sales and profitability.

The software is intended to provide better stock visibility, stock control and merchandising, and improve planning.

Trotman is also keen to automate performance monitoring – especially in stores – which is a manual process at present. “Business processes will be adapted, but the way that we do business won’t change,” he said. “We will just do things more efficiently and react more quickly.”

TM Lewin has also recently outsourced its warehousing, so CIMS will be interfaced with the Red Prairie warehouse management system that is used by the outsourcer.

Trotman said that he did not want to impose the CIMS warehouse management system on the outsourcer, because he did not want it to have an excuse for poor performance.

In the past five years, the business has grown from five stores to 55 and expanded its product range significantly. Trotman would not say how many more stores the firm plans to open in the next 12 months. However, he added: “We will be pretty unrelenting in terms of growth.

“Prologic has lots of experience of working with fast-growth retail groups. The scale that they have reached is of interest to us, as it’s where we expect to go.”

Mail order and online sales account for about 16 per cent of sales. Trotman said that the retailer wants to introduce multi-currency web sites to make purchasing easier for
overseas customers.

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