Case study: ECR Retail Systems in cooperation with Flexmonster
Established in 1973, ECR Retail Systems has come a long way since releasing its first mobile EPoS system in the 1990s. Now ECR is recognized as a market-leading provider of full end-to-end mobile EPoS systems. With clients in more than 20 countries around the world, ECR transforms business operations with innovative solutions, making a significant impact on the future of retail.
Being one of the oldest EPoS providers in the world, ECR is renowned for the quality of its systems that enable businesses to grow rapidly. And we have the honor of presenting the results of our fruitful cooperation with ECR.
Company profile
Founded by: retail specialists from Hertfordshire.
Countries: the United Kingdom, France, Vietnam.
Industries: Retail, Business & Local Authorities, Leisure, Health and Wellbeing, Hospitality, In-flight, Ticketing.
Products: mobile or fixed point of sale terminals.
Gains: supplying the software used on five continents by world-renowned organizations.
Challenges faced by ECR
Soon after the previous OLAP solution stopped working, ECR faced the challenge of finding a new web pivot add-on. The requirements were as follows:
- Seamless working with Microsoft SQL databases
- OLAP-style data analysis (with drag & drop, slice & dice, and filtering)
- Processing of large data sets
- Wide range of built-in aggregations
- Conditional formatting for coloring cells’ text and background
- Ability to add calculated columns based on extracted data
- Ease of use and configuration
- Excellent performance of data loading and processing
- Responsive and knowledgeable support
Flexmonster successfully met all of them. And here’s what came out of our collaboration.
ECR in cooperation with Flexmonster
Now Flexmonster is a part of a reporting suite within the mobile PoS systems delivered by ECR. It allows the ECR team to deliver tailored reports without requiring a developer.
Flexmonster Pivot Table & Charts ensures real-time visibility and dynamic pivot reporting for ECR clients.
End users can generate user-specific reports and gain valuable insights into stock and sales data. It’s worth noting that the amounts of data reported and analyzed in Flexmonster vary from hundreds to millions of rows since the ECR solution is based on Microsoft SQL Server databases.
The ease of use was an absolute must for ECR. Thus, now users can benefit from configuring reports via the UI using filtering, sorting, cross tabbing, aggregating, and drilling through data. No less important is the ability to calculate measures based on the various elements of data.
We also followed another key requirement, namely compatibility with all modern browsers and platforms.
Data analysis, which encompasses observing conditions of sales, profits, expenses, sold units and other metrics, can be seamlessly carried out with Flexmonster. Besides, the extent to which it can be adapted to the specific user’s needs is a huge benefit for ECR clients.
Role of Flexmonster in the typical flow of ECR systems
The system data is created and maintained on the ECR back-office solution. Sales and stock transactions are recorded on ECR’s mobile devices. The generated data is uploaded to a resiliently hosted system with dedicated databases. Thanks to Flexmonster, end users can run numerous reports to generate lists they need, display charts, analyze the extracted data, and take strategic actions based on insights.
Feedback about Flexmonster
Flexmonster is an excellent addition to the ECR Software, very easy to use and maintain. It has been very difficult to find a usable pivot add-on that works directly on the web with such performance, visual capabilities, and quality. Partnering with Flexmonster has become an important part of our strategy and has helped us to deliver a workable and affordable solution for our clients. The staff at Flexmonster are helpful and efficient, their support comes across as being knowledgeable, efficient, and very pleasant. They have a great product that ensures that we can offer sophisticated data manipulation to our clients.
ECR Retail Systems
We are happy that Flexmonster's capabilities perfectly matched ECR's requirements. We do hope our cooperation will last for many more years.