Torex tech treats Thorntons to quicker sales

Chocolate chain Thorntons has speeded up transactions and slashed customer queuing times by rolling out a new chip and PIN-friendly point of sale (POS) system.

Nine hundred Torex Retail POSes have been installed across Thorntons' UK estate - some 380 stores - which has led to customer queuing times being cut by two-thirds.

The £800,000-plus contract deal was signed in June last year and the bulk of the installation was completed by the end of October 2008, with the last handful of stores getting the kit after Christmas.

Thorntons selected Toshiba to deploy the kit, IT director, Steve Harris, said. "When going through the original tendering process we looked for a hardware partner that could specifically hit the timescale that we wanted to achieve," he said.

Harris said the retailer's legacy POS system was long overdue an upgrade, being well past its sell-by-date at 12-years-old.

"We couldn't develop the system any further - the vendor didn't want to develop an old system so it was limiting us in terms of the type of promotions we wanted to run, in terms of speed of performance and the fact that the support for the system was very limited," he told silicon.com.

The increasing frequency of hardware failures was also causing headaches - not least because spare parts were becoming harder to come by.

But the key driver for deploying a new system was to integrate chip and PIN and speed up transactions.

"Previously we had a Chip and PIN system and a POS system and there wasn't any integration between the two so, with anybody paying by card, the operator of the till would have to do dual entry. For us the big win was getting that integrated Chip and PIN system," Harris said.

Another benefit of the new system is enabling "near real-time" sales information, Harris said, putting an end to overnight batch reporting.

Thorntons has not yet fully implemented all the functionality of the new system either - and phase two of the rollout will see features including stock management within stores, webmail, contactless payments and fraud analysis also coming online, said programme manager, Jim McLauchlan.

"Really it's opened up a lot more functionality than we ever had access to on the previous system," Harris added.