Retail Pro’s flagship retail management software product, Version 9.2, extends its global leadership as both a store management and point of sale solution, combined with multi-national headquarters management, merchandising, inventory management, customer relationship and consolidation capabilities.  While the robust feature set in Retail Pro is well established, Retail Pro International, LLC. continues to invest heavily in R&D as evidenced in their latest release: R3.

Retail Pro Version 9.2 R3 enhances a wide range of areas within the product, including overall performance and ease-of-use improvements. However, this is not just a maintenance release – it includes a host of features the diverse Retail Pro customer base can readily exploit.

The features begin with enhancements to customer management, including faster customer lookups and results sorting, along with better allocation, assignment and communication capabilities between regions and districts. Users are also now able to selectively define which fields are required vs. optional. The inventory management area has also been enhanced with additional security features and an improved physical inventory counting process.

In support of Retail Pro’s advanced capabilities for managing complex corporate structures and organizational hierarchies (including franchises), the intercompany transfer area has been enhanced. Retail Pro is also well known for its ability to accommodate a wide variety of external system integrations and advanced reporting and analytics. The new DataStor product allows these extensions to operate at maximum efficiency through affordable and seamless integration with a standalone instance of the Retail Pro database.

Retail Pro’s extensive fraud control and overall operational visibility have also been enhanced with advanced database auditing and added security for certain transactions and operations (adjustment memo reasons, UPC creation, serial type assignment and others).

Retail Pro version 9.2 R3 also adds three new links to popular accounting systems, along with a next generation integrated high-performance payment processing engine, and support for a variety of additional peripheral devices. In addition, an improved licensing capability enables specific features to be licensed so that alliance partners can more readily extend the Retail Pro suite to address industry specific vertical markets.

Finally, the already extensive reporting suite included with Retail Pro has been extended and enhanced.

Individually, these enhancements are all exciting; together, they’re a testimony to Retail Pro’s forward thinking leadership and commitment to ongoing product R&D investment.

For more information, please see: http://www.retailpro.com/RequestMoreInformation.php

As the global economy struggles to regain its strength, retailers are forced to make difficult choices about where they invest their scarce resources and what to expect in return. Should they buy or lease new store locations now that real estate prices have fallen? Or should they invest in technology? How about operational improvements? Employee productivity? Without adequate tools for decision making, picking the path with the best Return on Investment would require major guesswork and more than a little luck. Fortunately that is where Business Intelligence (BI) or Retail Analytics (RA) can make a difference.

BI or Retail Analytics tools ideally address several critical factors – first, they help businesses extract more value from  IT investments they have previously  made. Next, they empower managers with insightful information about their business that is not available through traditional daily or weekly flash reports. Also, a good analytics tool brings together valuable comparative data in an easy-to-use and understand dashboard-style graphical format. The simple graphical view can then be clicked upon for successive “drill-down” levels that expose the detailed data behind the dashboards. For example, Retail Pro dashboards can be personalized to each employee’s liking: sales by store, sales by hour, sales by zip code, margins, average receipt size, sales by department or style, total markdowns, vendors comparisons, stock on hand, etc. In summary, decisions no longer need to depend on guesswork, hope and luck. Managers now have daily access to valuable facts and trends from various parts of their business that can enrich their quest for continual business improvement. 

How to get started with BI? Existing Retail Pro customers have an easy path. Your Retail Pro POS and back-office system already has a wealth of data within it, ready to be transformed through BI into a dashboard format and delivered to your web browser wherever you are. For more information about our Retail Pro Business Intelligence module visit http://www.retailpro.com/solutions/BusinessIntelligence.php and then contact your authorized Retail Pro Business Partner for details.

For those retailers who are not a Retail Pro customer, we encourage you to take a closer look at our very popular retail management software to unlock the full potential of your business. To request more information and let us know if you want us to have an authorized Retail Pro Business Partner contact you right away, please visit us at http://www.retailpro.com/RequestMoreInformation.php