les magasins bleus improve sales and inventory management using motorola's mobile solutions
Motorola, Inc. (NYSE: MOT) and Timcod, one of France's leading integrators, today announced that Les Magasins Bleus, a specialist in the sale of textile products direct to customers, has chosen a solution from Motorola’s Enterprise Mobility business to help improve its sales processes and inventory management for door to door sales.
The mobile solution comprises Motorola’s MC50 Enterprise Digital Assistants (EDA) connected via Bluetooth™ to Zebra RW420 printers equipped with credit card readers to take payments. The solution is being rolled out to all 400 salespeople working for Les Magasins Bleus in France and will be fully functional by the end of 2007. The Motorola route accounting solution will help improve inventory management, sales, and the resulting payment and collection operations. Sales people will use the terminal to scan an item's bar code, thus allowing them to obtain information specific to an item such as its availability and price in just a few clicks. They can then close the sale and process the payment on the customer’s door step, helping to increase sales and speed up the delivery process. The customer is given a receipt printed out by the printer and a bank card slip if this payment method was used.
For the past ten years, Les Magasins Bleus has used products from Symbol Technologies, which was recently acquired by Motorola to form its Enterprise Mobility business. When Les Magasins Bleus sought new mobile computers to modernise its solutions, it called upon Timcod, a long-standing Magasins Bleus service provider, to carry out a re-engineering study to find an upgrade to its solution that would offer greater durability, robustness and reliability.
The chosen solution, deployed by Timcod and Motorola, has many advantages; including giving Les Magasins Bleus a more modern and dynamic company image. Sales people already using the solution are now more productive, and the solution has also helped reduce costs significantly, particularly management operations and operating expenses. Moreover, the mobile computer's user-friendly features, together with the intuitive Timcod-developed application, have made its adoption easier for users.
"Les Magasins Bleus considers keeping up to date with technological developments essential because it can make such a big difference to its business. In particular, they need reliable hardware to ensure a durable solution. Motorola's MC50 mobile computer, combined with Zebra's RW420 printer, met these requirements while offering the advantage of robustness and high performance. The application we developed has been seamlessly integrated into the equipment, providing Les Magasins Bleus’ salespeople with an intuitive, user-friendly solution that meets all their needs in the field," explains Jacky Voisine, Timcod Director.
"A world leader in mobile solutions, Motorola offers a unique level of experience and expertise in mobile technology deployment," said Nicolas Segons, managing director of Motorola’s Enterprise Mobility business in France. "The solution created for Les Magasins Bleus clearly demonstrates our ability to provide complete, high-performance enterprise mobility solutions that seamlessly deliver critical business applications faster.”
