Retail IT Pain Points [Part Two]

In our last blog, we talked about some of the IT pain points in the retail industry, where managing POS (Point of Sale) systems seem to take up the majority of IT professionals’ time. In today’s blog, we’ll focus on even more pain points IT professionals in retail face and how we can help.

Downtime is Lost Revenue: The time it takes to update your organization’s POS software can mean making a sale (or several sales) and losing business to a competitor. Gartner estimates that one hour of network downtime—planned or unplanned—costs the average company $ 42,000.  Some form of planned or unplanned downtime will happen to your POS systems during business hours, and you need a solution that two people can use a computer at the same time. A web-based console can be operated remotely in the background, and it keeps a POS device up and running throughout the maintenance process. It’s non-disruptive and shows that no lost sales can be attributed to the IT department.

Users Need to Be Up-and-Running Quickly: New IT users need to be educated and trained on your company’s IT policies and procedures. Salespeople need to be finished quickly so they can behind the cash registers as soon as possible. To streamline this process, you need to apply pre-configured user profiles to new employees. Use workflow technology to build user profiles and automatically apply them to new users remotely and with the push of a button. This allows you to focus on more pressing matters.

Not All Users are Experts: IT professionals are often plagued by “hobbyists” who’ve taken a computer courses or played around on their personal laptops. These users believe that they can install patches and run security scans, or even fix simple problems with the POS system. These users mean well, but they can pose a huge risk for your organization if a user downloads a virus that wipes out the POS system. You need a serious, enforceable approach to security.

Stay tuned for our final blog on IT pain points in the retail industry, and in the meantime, don’t hesitate to contact the retail IT industry experts at Informs, Inc. to help