Harold Pener’s Man of Fashion (Kansas City, MO) is
a clothing store chain that specializes in profes-
sional and casual attire for young men. The retail-
er has been in business for 88 years. In the past 10 years,
Man of Fashion has grown from 5 to 29 stores. This accel-
erated growth spurt emphasized weaknesses in the com-
pany’s POS system. The company could access basic infor-
mation about a sale (e.g. item sold, date of transaction), but
was unable to drill down into specifics (e.g. product size,
style, color). Furthermore, Man of Fashion could not trace
the sales path of a product or the purchasing history of a
customer. The sporadic availability of the little sales infor-
mation it could view was also an issue. The company had
to wait for each store to conduct a polling procedure at the
end of the work day before it could retrieve updated sales
figures. This procedure required stores to post its daily
activities for the home office to download via modem.
The limitations of Man of Fashion’s POS system caused all
kinds of problems. First, layaways were nearly impossible
to track. Once a layaway was picked up or canceled, the
account was permanently deleted from the system’s mem-
ory, with no reference to the layaway’s outcome. Second,
the inability to retrieve detailed information about an item
made it difficult for
the retailer to clearly
identify the specific
products it needed to
order.
Man
of
Fashion’s warehouse
procedures
com-
pounded this issue.
When new merchan-
dise was received in
the retailer’s distribu-
tion centers, it was
manually
divided
among
the stores
according to a transfer
log. No verification
procedures
were
implemented
to
ensure products were
distributed accurately
according
to size,
color,
style,
etc.
Uncertainties surrounding product need combined with
human error in distribution resulted in noticeable invento-
ry oversights. It became apparent that Man of Fashion
would have to upgrade its POS system to ensure the suc-
cess of its new stores and establish a platform for futur