Millies Cookies

Millie’s Cookies takes fresh look at EPOS
All-singing all-dancing EPOS (electronic point of sale) terminals are proving star performers for an American style cookie and muffin maker.

Millie’s offers a huge range of fantastic tasty products with cookies at the heart and soul of the company and sells millions across the UK every year. However, it was struggling to control a business operation, which now has over 100 touch screen terminals across the estate.

MCR deployed the new EPOS system, incorporating their unique back-office web based application Symphony reporting. This enables Millie’s to update stocks and sales information for each outlet and is available to head office online.

“It has changed the way we operate”
Says Chris Goble, loss prevention manager for SSP Rail, Millie’s and Harry Ramsden’s.

“We can keep an eye on trading at each of our units and the system is able to track the movement of stocks around all sites.

The installation of the new tills has given the business a great measure of success enabling units to access sales data in SSP’s management information system, and introduce standard cash control procedures to ensure that there is a minimum risk of fraud. “

Up until February 2007, all Millie’s Cookies sites operated on very old Omron 46 tills. These were locally programmed for price and product changes by site management and support and deployment was becoming increasingly difficult.

You are what you eat
Reporting sales data was laborious, staff had to manually record figures from till sales reports and then fax to HQ. These figures were then put into excel spreadsheets which calculated unit theoretical and actual GP. Not only was this time consuming for operators, there was no guarantee that data was accurate. The system did not create an analysis of transactional data and the units’ sales mix, an essential tool for driving sales and controlling the gap.

Matthew Gatter, director at MCR Systems explains how they achieved completion of such a large scale project so quickly:
“Millie’s were looking for a ten week roll out which when you consider the size of the project you appreciate just how much work is involved.

There was a rapid deployment of terminals to the sites including high street stores and kiosks. For speed of deployment, GSM modems with temporary till-to-till cabling were installed initially, and within a very short timescale, data started to feed into their information management system immediately. Soon after, the ADSL phone lines were installed and the entire system rolled out through the estate. Now the technology can effectively do what the company needs it to and that’s all we can ask for! “

Points Of Interest

• A site survey was carried out to assess cable requirements
• ADSL phone lines installed
• Over 100 Uniwell DX895 Touch Screen POS deployed
• 73 sites rollout out within 10 weeks
• MCR provided full Project Management & Installation services
• Off site training was rolled out to managers including till operation and cash handling
• All sales data from the sites is centrally processed through Symphony