When the first Habitat opened its doors in 1964, style conscious householders finally had a store which offered designer style at high street prices. Despite competition from similar concepts (notably from Sweden), the Habitat brand has become a household name in the UK, as well as launching successful stores in ten European countries, including Ireland.

First opened in 1995, the 3-floor Ireland store became a Habitat franchise operation in February 2002 and now has an average weekly footfall of 15,000 people. While consumers constitute the majority of its sales, the franchise also offers a business-to-business furnishing service which has proved highly popular with hotel owners and landlords.
As a franchise, the Dublin store has some freedom to offer a wider range than the core Habitat stock, such as its recent Thailand Furniture and Furnishings Promotion. To support its different offerings and enable it to achieve its future expansion plans, the owners have invested in Futura's Futur@ERS, a comprehensive IT system with integrated EPoS, stock management and reporting.
" We wanted a solution which would provide integrated stock and retail management for greater efficiency; and which would be easy enough to operate without the need to employ specialist IT people," said franchise owner, Malcolm Curzon.

Now fully installed, the system is separate from Habitat's SAP-based solution but linked through a node on the company's WAN so that order details can be dispatched overnight to Habitat's UK warehouse for processing. It also enables staff to switch between information about stock held by the franchise and that held by Habitat.

At the point of sale, there are 14 tills (six of which are available in store for keying in detailed customer orders as well as till operations) running Futura's Windows-based EPoS software. The combination of easy-to-use software, scanners and Epson TM-T88III thermal receipt printers can be mastered with less than two hours training and enables sales to be processed with optimum efficiency by weekend, as well as permanent staff. Indeed, according to Malcolm Curzon, "the printers are so fast and reliable that I have barely had to give them another thought".

What's more, as you would expect from a store which celebrates good design, all the hardware was selected for its look - charcoal grey and flat screen terminals - which perfectly complements the in-store environment.

Meanwhile, in the back office, Malcolm Curzon, has also been delighted by the ease at which he can obtain detailed management reports. He commented: "We can run off a wide range of standard reports in next to no time and when we want to track specific product ranges such as dinnerware, we can change the report attributes quickly and easily, rather than wait for two weeks for an IT programmer to do the job."

He added: "Overall, the new system has helped us operate more efficiently and, thanks to its scalability, we can extend it as we open additional stores."