Retail

Case Study: Courtside Sports

“Microsoft Retail Management System has provided us with a complete, affordable solution to manage all aspects of our business which allows us to get back to doing what we do best, providing first class customer service…”

-Al Klieber, Owner, Courtside Sports

Courtside Sports is one of Canada’s most established and respected racquet sports specialty stores, offering a wide selection of unique products for tennis, squash, badminton, racquetball and table tennis. Courtside Sports was established in 1990 as a destination shop for avid racquet sports players in Victoria, BC. Owners Al Klieber and Rose Del Rosario have put always put customer service at the fore front of their operation, using custom built software to manage racquet service histories, shopping preferences, direct marketing campaigns and more. In 2000, Courtside Sports looked to the Internet as a way to increase revenues by leveraging their existing inventory, staff and infrastructure. The original courtsidesports.com didn’t integrate with the existing DOS based point-of-sale at Courtside Sports. This resulted in two product databases being managed separately, often producing inaccuracies in pricing and inventory availability. “With over 3000 products available in our retail store and online, we were constantly chasing inventory to satisfy customer demand”

In 2003, Courtside Sports decided it was time to clean house in terms of their retail technology. The DOS point of sale had to be replaced with a modern Windows system with full integration to a new web store. The first step was to find the right retail application to build on. Courtside Sports looked at a variety of solutions, but settled on Microsoft Retail Management System. “Choosing a Microsoft application that is so widely supported made us feel confident that we would never be married to one particular vendor, partner or developer with proprietary technology. It just seemed like a smart choice that would allow us to concentrate on selling tennis racquets…”.

The original plan for Courtside Sports was to build an integration from RMS to a Microsoft Commerce Server 2002 powered website. After many months of custom development and the project not being anywhere near completion, Courtside Sports began to look for a more standard web integration for Retail Management System and found NitroASL’s rmsWebLinX. Cork, Ireland based NitroASL had been working with Retail Management System for many years and had a deep understanding of how to successfully integrate a web store to RMS as well as provide practical work flow tools for businesses selling products online. With a number of other successful businesses using rmsWebLinX, Courtside Sports was satisfied that using this complete, hosted solution for their web store would save them time, money and the headaches associated with owning and maintaining their own custom systems. Courtside Sports launched their rmsWebLinX web store in October of 2004, and since then has reduced the monthly operating costs of their online business by 50% and cut the time to process a web order by 1/3.

“The benefits of Retail Management System go far beyond the web integration though” states Al Klieber. “With all of our systems integrated now, we finally have the ability to accurately report on all aspects of the business with confidence. The guess work is gone. We can now make business decisions based upon hard data from RMS’s dynamic reports.” Updating from outdated systems has also allowed the owners and managers of Courtside Sports more freedom and versatility in their organization. With Microsoft Small Business Server 2003, Courtside Sports has 7 workstations that are centrally managed and allows users to connect in remotely to complete their tasks. “The retail environment often makes it difficult to focus on purchasing and inventory management tasks. With remote access to Retail Management System I can give complete focus to my inventory system when I need to and then spend more time focusing on my customers.”

“By standardizing on Microsoft technologies and working with an experienced partner like The RSC Group we’ve gained some powerful tools to run our business while maintaining simplicity in our technology systems. In a specialized business like ours, we might have been able to satisfy 100% of our needs with custom solutions, but RMS gets us 80% to 90% of the way there at a fraction of the cost.”