Real-Time Retailing

Today's tough retail environment demands fast decisions that are based on up-to-the-minute information. The supply chain needs sales information, marketing need to see early results of promotions and loss prevention staff need to combine operator activity with sales information.

FREEDOM's Information Centre makes store activity data available in real-time to any point in the enterprise and is proven across thousands of retail sites, dealing with multiple terabytes of information.

Detailed information is extracted from the entire store estate, cleaned and then stored in an enterprise database. From here, it can be interrogated using business analysis tools such as SQL Reporting Services and Cognos or directly by other central applications.

Information Centre also provides exporting services that can deliver all or subsets of the information to other systems in the enterprise using:

  • XML exports that conform to the ARTS standard
  • ASCII exports for rapid bulk loading into data warehouses
  • Web Services for targeted information extraction and updates

Information Centre is fully integrated with all of the other central FREEDOM solutions such as Refund Management, Loss Prevention, Loyalty, Gift Cards and Cashless Environments. In addition, it is already fully integrated with the IBM 4690 system, IBM ACE and NCR's ACS and can be integrated with virtually any other store system for minimal effort.