Oracle

Business Challenge Mark's Work Wearhouse is a wholly owned subsidiary of Canadian Tire Corporation, operating 321 stores throughout Canada. Mark's specializes in ready-to-wear apparel and business casual attire. Growing very rapidly in the past eight years, it has more than doubled its revenue and number of stores. Saddled with a rigid legacy point-of-sale (POS) system and high cost structure, Mark's Work Wearhouse needed a scalable POS solution capable of reducing costs and improving customer service, while supporting the company's accelerated expansion plans.

"Managing costs is very important for any organization," said Robin Lynas, Chief Information Officer for Mark's Work Wearhouse. "In retail IT, however, it is critical. Retail is a tough industry, and our margins are under more pressure than in other industries, requiring us to be very diligent in evaluating how we spend our IT dollars. We need to reduce costs and deliver benefits to our stores whenever possible."

The Customer

► Industry: Retail, Specialty—Business Casual
► Headquarters: Alberta, Canada
► Number of Stores: 320+
► Annual Sales: $465 million

Oracle Retail Products

► Oracle Retail Point-of-Sale

Major Benefits Achieved

► Reduced point-of-sale (POS) operating costs by 50%
► Reduced new store opening costs by 30%
► Accelerated in-store training by 50%
► Reduced overall help desk inquiries by 25%

What Did Oracle Retail Do?

Mark's Work Wearhouse's legacy POS system was very stable. However, it required a significant cost structure to support it-- primarily through the use of AS/400 servers in every store to ensure maximum up time, a must in any retail POS environment. Lynas saw an opportunity to improve store operations while lowering its cost structure by leveraging a new technology in the store. A new POS system powered by Java would reduce store technology costs while maintaining application uptime.

An initial pilot with a different Java-based POS system proved unsuccessful, failing to scale to meet Mark's Work Wearhouse's POS transaction processing needs. Undeterred by this early stumbling block, Lynas selected a Java-based solution, Oracle Retail Point-of-Sale, (formerly Retek Point-of-Sale) in the spring of 2002.