Good Responsibility Even Goodwill Now Saves Money at Our Stores New POS system saves customers and employees time and money.
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Ambassador | Spring 2010
magine reducing the time it takes for our cashiers to check out each customer by one to two minutes. That might not seem like much, but our Goodwill processed more than three million retail transactions in 2009. Now that minute or two equals hundreds of hours of time saved. A simple, yet state-of-the-art point-of-sale system, has been tested at our Charlotte Avenue store and has proven to make the check-out process faster and more accurate. “This new system has given us a lot better customer service at the register,” says David Jenkins, senior director of retail. “In the past the cashier had to key in skew numbers and calculate discounts. When that happens there’s a large margin for error.” The new system holds the
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cashier to just three simple steps including punching in the department and tag color. To choose a specific item, the keys have photos making it easy to recognize each item and then the register automatically determines the price, including applicable discounts. Our IT department is responsible for maintaining the 131 registers at our 33 stores and, as Director of IT, Ed O’Kelley says, “We were tired of constantly changing configurations for our system and having to update and upgrade. It was an expensive process.” The new point-of-sale hardware provides a longer lifecycle and is easier to fix and faster to replace than the desktops that had been in
the stores. “When we set up a new store, we’re able to deploy the POS system in a day, instead of the week or two it used to take. That ease of use is proving very valuable for our Goodwill.” Jenkins adds, “Training new cashiers now takes minutes rather than hours. In fact, it’s so simple that when we train all the cashiers for the company-wide roll-out we’re doing it by conference call.” All 33 Goodwill stores should have the new system in place by the end of May. Neither O’Kelley nor Jenkins could put a price tag on the savings of time and money, except to say, “It’s priceless.”