Fashion house Paul Smith picks Cegid cloud-based retail management to support expansion plans

Cloud retail system was 'deemed necessary in order to evolve and develop our future retail systems strategy', says Paul Smith IT head

Fashion house Paul Smith has picked retail software provider Cegid's cloud-based retail management solution to help support its international expansion plans.

The company, which was founded in Nottingham in 1970 and has expanded to sell its collections in 73 countries, wanted a tool that would support renewed retail expansion.

"The adoption of a new technology solution was deemed necessary in order to evolve and develop our future retail systems strategy," said Lee Bingham, head of IT at Paul Smith.

The firm aims to fully implement the solution by mid-2015, which would enable its stores to have a live view of stocks and sales, in addition to other features.

"Cegid's software will play a key role in the management and efficiency of our retail business, in particular for our merchandising, supply chain and multichannel environments," said Bingham.

"It is crucial to have a consistent and highly reliable retail solution to ensure that we deliver a valued level of service and support into store for our retail and merchandising teams and, more importantly, our customers," he added.

Bingham believes that a software-as-a-service (SaaS) model will give Paul Smith a "single unified retail solution" that will help improve customer service and functionality. In the long-term, he believes this will enable new "omni-channel" opportunities, and better integration with other systems.

According to Bingham, the technology and systems development offered by Cegid will "significantly improve in-store services and systems".

Last year, Bingham told Computing that Paul Smith had saved more than £840,000 in IT costs in one year after launching a hybrid cloud solution using a combination of Windows Server, Hyper-V and Microsoft System Center.

He stated at the time that the company expected further savings as a result of moving to a hybrid cloud model.

"Now we have the option to say, ‘do we invest in some HP servers, or do we just buy computing resources from Windows Azure'; hybrid cloud computing really does give us the ability to tailor our infrastructure so that we can provide more services, more quickly, at less cost," Bingham explained.