Revolutionising A Family Business With Integrated EPOS & Ecommerce For A Retail Shop

Howsafe Ltd started in 1978 as a family run business and has grown to be one of Peterborough’s largest workwear and personal safety equipment suppliers.

Howsafe Ltd is the one of the largest stores of its kind in the UK and is home to an impressive showroom dedicated to displaying their range of workwear, safety equipment and cleaning supplies. Howsafe supply companies of all sizes, from sole traders to some of the largest companies in the UK both locally and nationally, through the use of both their store and their website.

Howsafe Ltd previously used Advena as their EPOS solution which was nearing its end of life and had some performance issues, making routine activities increasingly difficult to manage, especially as the business grew. They wanted to improve their sales in store and wished to take their business online, so needed a system that could incorporate both an Ecommerce website as well as tills on their shop floor. They also needed the ability to manage their warehouse and size/colour/style matrices to cater for the workwear side of the business were needed.

Although the new system was needed to manage multiple processes, Howsafe specified that the system must be robust and reliable, whilst remaining fast and capable of processing high volumes of orders on the shop floor.

Howsafe needed a system that would grow and develop with their business and after considering multiple solutions, decided that KCPOS was the best solution for them because it catered for their industry so well. KCPOS is constantly being developed and updated to provide the latest functionality, so Howsafe knew that this was the only system that would be able to keep up with their fast paced industry.

KCPOS was implemented at Howsafe with 2 tills on the shop floor, a KCPOS online sales powered website and KCPOS Commercials which the tills and the website both integrated with. KCPOS Commercials also manages Howsafe’s warehouse so now all three areas of the business can be viewed and analysed from the same system.

The main benefit of KCPOS to Howsafe is the integration of their tills, accounts software and Ecommerce website; this has given them the ability to manage their whole business through a single system. Howsafe find being able to view their business from a ‘single picture’ extremely useful as the time taken to analyse their business has been dramatically reduced. Howsafe is a fast growing business in an ever changing industry and as KCPOS is continually developed they can be sure that their EPOS system will keep up to date with their business.

Staff at Howsafe find the new system very easy to use and think that the style/colour/size matrices are particularly useful. Web orders are very easy to process and they have needed little training on the system.

Now that Howsafe’s EPOS solution has been implemented they have the opportunity to concentrate on improving other areas of the business. One of these areas is in directing traffic to their website; Howsafe are looking at investing in a Search Engine Optimisation plan from their KCPOS provider which will direct targeted traffic to their website through the use of well researched keywords and other proven techniques.

Despite the potential increase in visitors to their website and potential increased sales, Howsafe can be at ease knowing that their online sales solution will continue to provide the same high standard of online order processing no matter how large the number of orders gets.

See how we can help your business grow with our integrated solutions.