Beaverbrooks extends Wi-Fi to support mobile tills

Jewellery chain Beaverbrooks is extending its in-store wireless network to support its mobile till strategy.

The connection from Meraki Wireless LAN will support netbooks used by staff to display product details and the company’s bespoke electronic point of sale (Epos) systems.

The deployment will also support in-store public Wi-Fi, which the company plans to roll out across in the near future.

The high-performance access points have been deployed in 20 stores so far, with the company taking an incremental approach to full deployment across its 64 stores.  

Patrick Walker, head of IT at Beaverbrooks, said a more reliable Wi-Fi network is crucial to its mobile till strategy, with the company having initially installed a basic network four years ago.

“This mobile solution is much more robust and technologically advanced,” he said. “Because it’s quite a big capital investment, we are doing it as and when we have an issue with the network. We are in conversations about replacing the remainder of the estate,” he said.

“The Epos system revolves around wireless because we use the mobile till so heavily, which is becoming expected now. We also do business through interest-free credit, and the application process is all online, which we can’t easily do through a static till. Our sales assistants use a number of websites as part of the sales process too.

“We use notebooks at the moment, which we are looking at replacing with tablets. We are waiting to see what Windows 8 has to offer, as it would be easier to move onto [a Microsoft tablet] rather than Apple or Android, as it would be more compatible with the rest of our systems, which are written in .Net,” he said.

Image courtesy of Astrocoz/Flickr