Corvinus University of Budapest

Marketing Department

Clothes ‘R’ Us

Point-of-Sale Initiative

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Duzsek Réka, oso9ef

MSc Marketing

Consumer Relationship Management

Course leader: Agárdi Irma

November 28, 2012

Clothes ‘R’ Us was a leading apparel store in the United States with more than four hundred national stores. They offered hip, but affordable clothing for men, women and children. Between 1990 and 1997 the company had great financial growth, but this revenue growth began to slow down in 1998. By 2000, Clothes ‘R’ Us had over-expanded and had the worst gross margins in the industry. In 2001 to reduce costs and regain its competitiveness they started to analyze the …show more content…

They couldn’t start the design, without the requirements; they couldn’t start programming the code itself, without the specific design, etc. So a delay in one phase, postponed the entire implementation of the POS system.

The case described Orlin’s calculations: each week the deployment was delayed constituted an additional cost of $92,000 and as much as $288,000 of lost savings when the system was fully deployed. This was a very expensive delay, so it was really important to get to the system implementation as soon as possible.

In my opinion there were also moral consequences of the delays. In these kind of situations, the teams also lose their motivation, and beside of the financial losses, these are also really important points. For example the GUI’s delay can make the design team unmotivated, because they have to wait almost a month to start their work. They are also working under pressure due to the delay of the team before. This can make the people involved in the whole process unmotivated and stressful.

4. What opportunities does the new POS system offer for CRM?

The POS system design included the corporate implementation of a customer relations management system. This system would accept rolled-up sales transaction data and later real-time access from any store’s POS to customers’ buying history and preferences.

CRM has become an integral part of any business