Outsourcer chosen for Halfords IT plan

BT Expedite wins £5.5m deal to revamp customer services

Retailer Halfords has outsourced a revamp of systems in its shops under a £5.5m, five-year contract.

A major part of the company’s IT transformation programme (Computing, 15 December) will be given to supplier BT Expedite, the retail technology subsidiary of BT.

The car and bike accessories company is overhauling its supply chain, head office and customer-facing systems.

Brian Scott, Halfords’ head of business systems, says the outsourcing arrangement will allow the company to introduce cutting-edge technology in its 402 UK shops.

‘We have relied on third-party providers with other projects, such as our SAP implementation. It is our policy that we use them if we don’t have the capabilities in-house,’ he said.

‘Our existing Epos [electronic point-of-sale] system is seven years old and our back-office systems are all home-grown.’

Halfords will implement packaged services from BT Expedite, including the integration of Epos data feeds and stock information with its Connected Retail Store package and a virtual training system, in the next 18 months.

The work will go towards replacing legacy IT inherited from former parent company Boots, and will improve product availability by providing better stock management.

‘We are introducing new technology, such as mobile handhelds and real-time stock visibility of stores,’ said Scott. ‘And we are moving towards fully integrated point-of-sale, real-time polling of stores and the ability to trickle feed the transactions as opposed to relying on overnight batch processing.’

At the moment, staff have to leave tills unattended to physically check if an item is in stock.

‘The major push is in the area of non-stock items or customer orders, where the current process is disjointed,’ said Scott.

‘It involves two or three computer systems that are not very user-friendly, and which will move to an integrated customer-ordering system.’

This new capability will provide a base for Halfords’ last transformation phase, involving its web site.

‘This will give our store technology plenty of functional headroom,’ said Scott.