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By Steve Ranger, 26 April 2005 16:20

NEWS Bookmaker William Hill is rolling out electronic point of sale (Epos) systems in all its shops to speed up the payment of winnings to lucky punters.

The FTSE 100-listed company has also embarked on a three-year project to upgrade its IT infrastructure.

William Hill started the trial of the new Epos system in December last year and has now started a programme to roll it out to all 1,600 of its shops by the end of the year, at a rate of 50 per week.

The company's IT director Victor Kemeny explained that before the rollout of the Epos systems, shop managers would have to settle bets manually.

"On Grand National day you would have a wad of betting slips that would choke a horse. You couldn't pay the punters until you'd settled the bets," he told silicon.com.

But following the Epos rollout, he said: "This is the last Grand National that our staff will have to manually settle the bets. That's going to be a big winner for us."

Because the bookmaker is doing its Epos rollout after its rivals, it can learn from their mistakes, he said. For example, it is using 130 trainers to make sure staff get the most from the technology.

"From a technical perspective it's just a logistics programme - 10 per cent technology, 40 per cent process and 50 per cent behaviour. Typically in this sort of project 60 per cent is technology, 30 per cent process and 10 per cent behaviour," Kemeny said.

Kemeny is also overseeing a major project to move William Hill from its legacy IT infrastructure to a new architecture over the next two or three years.

We'll be bringing you a full interview with William Hill IT director Victor Kemeny soon.