Recent increasing demand for IT solutions in the retail industry, has made it an attractive market for many solution vendors and Microsoft is not an exception. In this article, I'm going to provide you with a short analysis of the Microsoft Retail Management Solution (RMS). Microsoft RMS provides small and midsize business retailers with an integrated point of sale solution to manage operations within one store or across a chain of stores and is available through Microsoft's certified sales partners. In this post, the strengths of the solution is covered.

Product Strengths

Microsoft's retail solutions gains competitive advantage due to its ease of use, integration capabilities, and vendor partners, which allows Microsoft to serve many retail verticals.

Microsoft RMS includes the main core functions and features of a POS system. Moreover, it has the look, feel, and ease of use that is common to Microsoft products. The graphical user interfaces (GUIs) of RMS and POS have the same look and feel as Microsoft Outlook. A user who is not technically savvy but who uses Outlook can easily enter a sales transaction without any training. Moreover, Microsoft POS has a very descriptive nomenclature that follows user functionalities. For instance, within the application, visual icons such as sales or transfers are clearly marked. Furthermore, if a question arises regarding certain features or functions, the help module integrated into the POS solution is user-friendly and complete, thus reducing training time.

In addition to easy navigation throughout the system, and a well-organized help module, Microsoft POS installation is relatively easy. The software offers step-by-step instructions during the installation process. Similar to the Microsoft Office Suite, the installation of POS can be done by non-technical users. This is an advantage for Microsoft, compared to Synchronic's Counterpoint SQL Express solution. The Synchronics solution is available through its resellers, which will only provide the solution as a package with its implementation services.

Due to the full integration of all of Microsoft's products, its retail solution implementation and configuration is relatively effortless. There are two approaches to setting up data within an enterprise solution: importing the data, or manually entering data into the application. Microsoft POS allows an import of data just by having inventory, customer, and supply information available on an Excel spreadsheet. Thus, instead of keying in all the information manually, or going through a lengthy process for data conversion, retailers can import the information and be ready to enter transactions within a few hours.

In contrast to Microsoft POS, Intuit's POS and accounting solutions for small retailers (QuickBooks Point of Sale and QuickBooks Financials) do not integrate with one another. Depending on the country where QuickBooks Financials was purchased, the POS solution from Intuit may not integrate, due to the different financial structure of each country. Other strengths of Microsoft integration capabilities include the remote access features; with the help of Windows XP Remote Access, owners can easily connect to the stores remotely, unlike products from certain vendors such as Fujitsu that need a third party solution.

Many verticals exist within the retail industry. Microsoft has many partners such as Elypsis (the wine and liquor vertical), RubinBrown IT Group (the hospitality vertical), Computeration Inc. (the entertainment vertical), or retail automation systems (the convenience store and gas pumps verticals). Not only are these partners trained on Microsoft retail products, they are usually experts within the verticals. They understand the unique business needs of the retailers and can suggest best-practice approaches.

(The original Analysis is done by Caroline Lam of Technology Evaluation)