Access to a wealth of information and keen awareness of ever-increasing shopping choices has increased consumer's knowledge and empowerment. Consumers have high expectations and demand the choice to connect, interact and transact whenever, wherever and however they want.

Shoppers are choosing an experience that is:

• Relevant and personalized able to address individual shopper's needs and preferences including ability to connect shoppers and influence.
• Seamless and convenient integrating multiple secure touch-points, including store, web and consumer owned mobile devices
• Timely and satisfying the right information and the right products and services at the right time through the right channel.

It's obvious to sustain and grow customer base, so retailers need to change to a more customer-centric approach. Now Retailers need solutions that enable his customer to connect, interact and transact secured new ways which ensures a tailored customer experience across all the channels the consumer chooses.

This need for enhanced customer experience across various channels, multiple touch points in the store, with changing technologies results in multiple solution vendors offering these solutions, can mean a complicated IT environment at the store. Thus to get the most benefit out of multi channel environments and multiple touch points in the store, retailers need an effective IT platform that is reliable, flexible, and extendable.

Polaris Retail InfoTech Ltd (PRIL) an end-to-end - provider of retail solutions with expertise across several verticals, categories and IBM have teamed up together to build a POS solution on the open-standards-based Java™ Platform, Enterprise Edition (Java EE)and combined it with IBM's Store Integration Framework.

Intellect Store leverages the experience that IBM and PRIL have gathered over the years in the retail sector to provide retailers with a robust and comprehensive application that simplifies the mandatory functionality of a typical retail business and offers an easy integration capability with multiple channels and consumer touch points enabling you to create a truly world-class store experience.

IBM's store integration framework A solution that can integrate much of a retailer's software and hardware past, present and future. To support this solution, IBM has combined its broad software portfolio with its retail expertise to deliver robust, open standards based capabilities that help you access your existing POS applications and systems, and integrate them with new industry-leading solutions.

Polaris's Retail Excel and IBM's store integration framework together deliver a solution that provides exhaustive functionality and open standards based SOA environment at the store. More specifically the solution from Polaris and IBM supports the following benefits and capabilities.

• Multi channel and self service capability The application can expose its business logic in the form of standard XML services interface thereby enabling you to easily integrate other multi channel and self service applications in the store.
• Open standards based SOA Infrastructure The solution uses ARTS's (Association for Retail Technology Standards) XML standards such as RTI, POSLog and Unified POS device access standards. Standards based SOA infrastructure is thus owned by the retailer, increasing the speed and reducing the costs for integration. The simplified integration and well thought design makes testing and rollout of new technologies easier.
• Strong promotion and campaigns engine Retail Excel's promotion management and campaigns functionality has evolved over more than a decade and can cater to any complex promotions scenarios
• Comprehensive back office functionality The application with back office modules such as procurement, replenishment, Inventory management, Financial accounting can very well support all the back store/store warehouse processes of a retailer.
• Easy to learn and easy to use The solution has been designed keeping in mind a lay operator. It has a single main screen that has easy to use and navigate menu options. It does not require the operator to switch between screens. Touch screen capability & hot keys provided further reduce operator fatigue.
• Offline capability The application will not disrupt your operations even if the connectivity between the till and POS server drops. Transactions can be continued at the till and get synched up as soon as the connection is up.
• Remote management capability offered by IBM's SIF enables you to effectively manage all your store's environments from the head office. Hence you can ensure very low to nil down time of systems at the store.
• Multi Currency and Multi Tender Support Supports multiple currencies and multiple tender options
• Internationalization Support for multiple languages
• Pre-defined reports Pre-defined and ready to use intelligent reports in built in the solution.
• Pre-integrated enterprise module with retail ERP functionality The Retail Excel HO application can cater to the needs of a retailer's merchandising, supply chain, accounting functions. Together the POS, Back office and Head office modules offer an end to end solution for retailer.
• Pre-built SAP Integration capability The solution has a pre-built SAP integration adaptor. Hence the solution can work in a plug and play manner in situations where a retailer is using SAP IS Retail or plans to use SAP IS Retail in future.