Motorway services, hospitality and leisure group Westmorland is planning to roll out a new EPOS system across its retail outlets in the north and to the Gloucester services currently being built alongside the M5.
The company wanted to leverage greater benefits from its retail system, in particular to reduce hardware, infrastructure and maintenance costs and to improve access to real-time information to support more effective management decisions and optimise operating costs.
Westmorland has chosen a cloud-based system from BCP called Accord Momentum and has already implemented it at its Tebay northbound motorway services, and reports that it is more than meeting project objectives and delivering real business benefits.
Lower specification, greener tills with solid state drives are already reducing costs while company-wide visibility of real time data is facilitating greater centralised reporting and control and enabling more accurate, quicker replenishment, feeding through to improved sales and profitability.
The design of the system enables faster and cheaper deployment of software and upgrades. This will be a benefit that will crystallise more cost savings over the coming months as the geographic spread of the business will increase significantly with the opening of the Gloucester services.
The nature of Westmorland’s motorway services business is such that any failure of the system preventing trading would have serious consequences. Most cloud systems need a fall-back solution or webserver to ensure trading can continue should there be a break in the communications infrastructure. However, the architecture of Accord Momentum addresses this resilience issue from within the software without the need for any fall-back solution.
Jon Lees, retail systems manager, explains: “It gives us the best of both worlds, allowing us to take advantage of the cost and delivery benefits of a cloud-based solution, but with the reassurance that we can continue to trade in exactly the same manner whatever happens to the communications infrastructure.”
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