Ring Bros. Marketplace - Growing Pains

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Growing Pains

Aug 12, 2009
From Progressive Grocer
-By Joseph Tarnowski

When South Dennis, Mass.-based independent Ring Bros. Marketplace installed its first point-of-sale (POS) system, it forecast its growth to double over the next few years. But executives at the company were wrong.

It quadrupled.

Ironically, this growth — ordinarily a good thing — began hurting the business as lines grew, especially during the summer when Cape Cod vacationers visited to stock up on goods for their vacation homes. On top of this, the increased workload taxed the secondhand DOS-based system, and it broke down with increasing frequency.

As if that wasn't enough, Ring Bros.' elaborate rewards system, which included mobile marketing, had to be integrated into the system when its rewards vendor, MobileLime, which had hosted it, exited the business. The POS system wasn't built to handle such a solution, and reward redemption transactions ground to a halt, taking in some cases three minutes to complete.

All this resulted in long, slow-moving lines, which for Don Fallon, Ring Bros.' general manager, were unacceptable. "We had four registers, and we would have to form a single common line and pull people down," says Fallon. "It got to the point last year where people were getting really upset with the way it had to work. They couldn't shop the aisles. And when shoppers see a long line, they have a bad taste in their mouth no matter how fast it moves."

So, after last summer's shopping season, Fallon decided enough was enough. It was time for a new POS system. "We had been researching systems for the past couple of years," says Fallon. "We were evaluating what was out there against what our needs were to find a system that worked for us. We were looking for something that we could go eight or 10 years with, that was scalable enough to handle new business and new applications in coming years."

He found that system last October during Progressive Grocer's Executive Roundtable on Technology and the Independent Grocer, which serendipitously was held at NCR's headquarters in Duluth, Ga. Following the roundtable, Fallon was given a demo of the vendor's Advanced Checkout Solution for Independent Retailers (ACS-IR), which, combined with NCR's RealPOS DynaKey interface, turned out to be the system he was looking for.

"It had the scalability and functionality we needed," says Fallon. "And with the DynaKey touchscreen, it was fast and easy to learn."

Especially since Ring Bros. sells many products with PLU and miscellaneous codes. "Not only were we adding two checkout lanes to handle our volume, but we also wanted to increase each lane's speed," says Fallon. "We wanted drop-down menus so that associates at the checkout could find the right code in four or less touches."

Front End Makeover

Ring Bros. bought a six-month-old system originally used by a grocer that went out of business. This included six workstations, a new server and a hand-held scanner. Ring Bros.' old server served as a backup. It was installed in April by Ring Bros.' Concord, N.H.-based reseller, CCR Data Systems, Inc., to be ready for the upcoming summer volume. Along with the POS system came new flooring and front end fixtures to accommodate its layout. Fallon handled all technology-related aspects of the installation, while grocery manager Pat Ring spearheaded the flooring and fixture installations.

Fallon experienced one of the system's benefits when he trained his associates on it immediately following installation. "We're training cashiers in about half the time we used to," he says. "We used to have a two-day training system in place here. With the DynaKey system, although we allot a day for training, in reality we're leaving them alone after a couple of hours."

In addition to cutting down training time, it cut down transaction time tremendously as well. Just in time, too, for July 3 was the grocer's busiest day ever. "We've never done that much business," says Fallon. "But we went through it without a hitch. We didn't have any lines at all; there were maybe a couple of people waiting at the checkouts at any given point during the day, but that's it. We could have handled at least 50 percent more traffic."