Success Story

Record time EPoS roll-out with Comptoir des Cotonniers
Comptoir des Cotonniers rolls out new state of the art VCSTIMELESS EPoS solutions across 12 countries in under 2 months

Fashion retailer, Comptoir des Cotonniers, with 300 stores in Europe, Asia and the US, has implemented new point-of-sale software through VCSTIMELESS. The Microsoft .NET based solution has allowed the company to keep track of sales and stock levels in real time. It has also led to operational tasks for stores becoming simpler and more efficient. The rollout was completed in a record two months, despite the size and scale of an international IT project. An innovative approach to remotely installing the new software meant that the old software could be partitioned and replaced with no disruption to services.

Updating IT systems for expansion
The Comptoir des Cotonniers business has grown fast, since opening its first two boutiques in France in 1995. It continues to expand, with around 130 more international stores planned for opening in the next few years. Due to its rapid expansion, Fast Retailing, the Japanese fashion group which owns the label (and other brands like Uniqlo and Princesse Tam-Tam), decided in 2006 to upgrade its information technology systems. It chose Microsoft’s ERP system for its head office: Dynamics AX, Windows Server 2003, a SQL Server 2005 database with 125 GB of storage space, and .NET 2.0 web services. Then, in 2007, the group needed to consider technology for its stores.

“ The existing system didn’t have any capacity for storing data at the store level,” said Marc Bernhard, IT director at Comptoirs des cotonniers. “Whenever there was a problem with the internet link with our central server in Toulouse, our stores lost all the IT tools necessary for running an efficient retail business, and so they had to do all the essential tasks manually.”