National Retail Services Center

On demand
The National Retail Services Center (NRSC), part of IBM Retail Store Solutions, is critical for retailers who want to implement the "retail on demand" vision. Here are some examples of how the NRSC can help retailers:

• Customizing IBM SurePOS™ ACE helps retailers positively differentiate the sales experience for customers and sales associates at the point of sale (POS).
• Providing loyalty data to various consumer touchpoints throughout the enterprise allows retailers to promote offers and deliver personalized marketing messages prior to checkout, which can help increase consumer spending. The Electronic Marketing Enterprise (EME) solution supports real time access to customer data, which can be critical for successful targeted marketing campaigns.
• IBM StorePay® helps retailers keep pace with new payment trends — from gift card consortiums to payment via biometrics — so consumers have access to a variety of tendering options.

• The Scan & Save® solution — an electronic consumer incentive program from Advanced Marketing Systems (AMS), for which the NRSC provides the technology — enables paperless coupon validation and clearing with increased fraud controls. This can help retailers reduce coupon handling costs, while adding a solution that can entice new consumers.
• T-log trickle solutions allow retailers to feed POS transaction data to enterprise systems as transactions occur, which helps optimize the supply chain and improve responsiveness to stock-outs.
• The StorePay payment system can be customized to encourage consumers to pay via debit or credit cards, providing an opportunity for retailers to reduce transaction fees.
• Touchscreen interfaces for the POS allow faster employee training, which eases the pain of sales associate turnover and helps reduce training costs.

• Many POS applications can be customized with icon-driven GUIs that make it easier for employees to complete transactions faster and can help eliminate errors.
• Implementing self checkout enables retailers to serve more customers at the front-end while freeing up staff to provide customer service in other areas of the store.
• Connecting operational store systems to centralized ERP systems provides decision support applications with timely data.

• The NRSC has a reputation for creating solutions that offer performance, scalability and fault-tolerant resilience.
• The NRSC has experience with a variety of solutions that require increased security, such as those that use wireless technology or handle sensitive data such as payment, loyalty and pharmacy-related information.