Recent Installations

Paradies Shops

Atlanta-based Paradies is the largest operator of airport concession stores in North America, with over 300 stores in airports across the United States and Canada. Paradies operates newsstands, gift shops, specialty stores and licensed merchandise outlets for organizations such as the PGA Tour, CNBC News and the Big Ten Conference. Airports with Paradies stores serve a half-billion passengers every year.

Challenge: Paradies' airport shops face a unique retail problem. They need to have fast, reliable checkout for the long lines of hurried customers that always seem to appear just before and after flights in each airport.

"Our goal for a new POS system was a powerful, reliable, networked system that could easily allow our store employees to quickly process transactions," said John O'Hare, director of Information Technology for Paradies. "It was very important that the POS systems be retail-hardened for the constant use in an airport environment.”

Solution: Following an analysis of Paradies’ current system and goals for improvement, Postec recommended transformation of all operations to a new host-based system supporting merchandising, distribution, financials, inventory control and point-of-sale across the entire company.

Postec recommended IBM SurePOS 500 point-of-sale terminals connected to a pSeires IBM eServer for the hardware platform. Customized software enables the sales staff to simply touch a "hot key" for popular, fast-selling items such as bottled water or USA Today, and the system automatically calculates the total.

"We had seen how rugged and dependable the SurePOS 500 has been in the food service industry, where employees are pounding it all day and where labor turnover and training are challenges. We knew that if it could survive in the food service business, it could take care of our requirements. The easy, touch-screen interface also allows us to reduce training time for new employees," O’Hare said.

Results: With the new networked system installed by Postec, Paradies can collect and report sales and inventory data back to their corporate headquarters in Atlanta. This feature alone creates significant cost savings for Paradies. For example, with their old equipment it took one person 10 hours a day to collect and compile sales data from its 11 shops in the Nashville airport. With the IBM SurePOS system from Postec, this same sales audit process now requires only two hours a day. As Paradies opens new types of shops, new inventory control requirements have surfaced such as tracking sizes and colors of apparel, all no problem with SurePOS solution. "The new system has reduced the number of products we must mark down, and now we are replenishing products based on what we are actually selling, not on what we thought we were selling," added Mr. O'Hare.