High-street fashion chains Oasis and Coast are upgrading their till equipment to support expansion plans and reduce maintenance time and costs.

Parent company Mosaic Fashions – which also owns Karen Millen and Whistles – is installing modular electronic point-of-sale (Epos) systems in all new Oasis and Coast shops.

‘All the new stores we open are going to have the new system,’ said Mike Padfield, Mosaic Fashions IT development manager. ‘We are also replacing the current systems in our top 20 Oasis stores.’

Between the Oasis and Coast brands, the company has opened nine shops and more than 27 concessions since March this year, and Padfield says the new Epos system will be installed in ‘at least the same number of stores again before the end of the year’.

The company’s current supplier, DigiPoS Systems, is implementing the Retail Blade Epos system with replaceable components to make maintenance easier.

‘We saw Retail Blade as a better system than the existing one, for a very similar price,’ he said. ‘And it is a better solution with more longevity because of the replaceable motherboards.’

Mosaic will maintain its current, third-party Epos maintenance contract for the time being, logging support calls about operational till problems to dispatch an engineer to fix till problems instore.

But the transaction time lost by Epos downtime could be avoided by exploiting the modular characteristics of the Blade system, says Padfield.

‘The incentive for this rollout is to use a courier maintenance system,’ he said. ‘If it is a matter of a straight motherboard swap, then the courier could do the swap instead. This would drastically reduce cost and give us much faster service levels.’

He also says the new system has USB functionality for linking peripherals such as printers into the new system, as well as a longer-than-average, 10-year warranty.

‘We will undoubtedly use USB peripherals in future,’ said Padfield. ‘And the warranty makes it much easier to write off the capital expenditure over a five-year period or longer, as well as limiting upgrade paths in future to main areas of need.’