Significant reduction in effort through automation of POS updates at TOM TAILOR

24th January 2023

TOM TAILOR is a casual lifestyle company based in Hamburg.

From here, TOM TAILOR operates its business - online, through its own stores, franchise stores and shop-in-shop stores in more than 30 countries. With nearly 3,000 employees and about 10 collections a year, TOM TAILOR is one of the leading companies in the industry.

In November 2022, TOM TAILOR commissioned consenso to develop intelligent software robots - so-called "bots" - to automate POS updates. The project's objective was to reduce manual efforts in support and maintenance of the POS-systems.

The maintenance of POS-systems is challenging due to the very narrow time windows available to work on them. In the fashion retail business, opening hours from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. are not unusual and shopping malls in particular are increasingly attracting their customers with extended opening hours. Retailers with a large store network like TOM TAILOR, operating also internationally, therefore have to update many POS in a very short time and without interfering with the running business. With two releases per year, this task is difficult to manage and places a considerable strain on IT resources.

In order to distribute these tasks across several "virtual" shoulders, consenso together with TOM TAILOR has redesigned the POS update process and transferred it into a workflow plan. In future, this workflow will be processed by intelligent bots, created by consenso using the RPA (Robotic Process Automation) software UiPath.

The bots do much more than just carrying out their tasks according to the workflow, they are also able to react adequately to unexpected events. For example, an update does not simply stop if the internet line is busy, but it waits until the required parameters have been processed. Integrated logging and notification management make it easier for the IT department to check the update process in retrospect and to act accordingly if intervention is necessary.

Furthermore, In addition to the pure update of the POS software, the bots can also perform other maintenance tasks beyond the actual release change, such as housekeeping jobs or the configuration of peripheral devices.

TOM TAILOR operates the bots for the update process in a so-called "unsupervised" mode: the bots work independently via cloud machines in the background and do not require any user input. This method enables parallelism in the POS updates - something  that one support staff member alone would not be able to ensure - which in turn leads to considerable scale effects.

By using the intelligent bots, the total time for the updates of about 100 POS could be reduced from more than 100 hours to about 10 hours. On the following day, the support staff only validate the successful update the following day, night or weekend work is no longer necessary.

We would like to thank TOM TAILOR for their trust and espacially for the very good collaborative partnership. It was a pleasure for us to implement the project together.

^{Photo: JEROME (stock.adobe.com, by courtesy of TOM TAILOR)}