IT in the retail industry 2

[TomKane]

Hi,

I was wondering if anyone out there plied their IT craft in the retail industry? The reason I'm asking is that a senior position in a department store has cropped up that looks to me like an interesting challenge but my to date my IT experience has been gained in financial institutions and manufacturing companies. I was wondering if you could give me a bit of a steer into what challenges face an IT guy in the cut and thrust of the retail sector.

Thanks,
Tom

 

[langleymass]

Find someone who works for a retailer's headquarters. Use the web site

http://www.linkedin.com

to locate people.

 

[stussy]

That's me to a tee...9 years IT experience, the last 6 of them in retail.

A lot depends on the scale of retailer you work for. I work for a single-site, family run retailer with around 300 employees. I look after 4 servers, around 20 workstations/laptops and 16 tills (or POS - point of sale - to use correct term), and we have around 100,000 retail items on the system.

The daily basics of my job involve:

* Management of the epos system (Microsoft Navision in this case)

* Installation & upkeep of network / servers / workstations / tills / hardware (lots of barcode scanners and printers!) / phones and pretty much anything else with a plug on it. This is why I refer to the scale of the retailer. If it's electrical, it winds up on my desk. There's very little room for 'that's not in my job desc'

* Running (not building or designing) the company website.

* Crystal Reports writing when Navision fails to provide the data in a decent shape (often).

What size company is it you are looking at? Your experience in other industries makes you sound pretty promising actually. To be honest, my greatest skill is probably not technical, but an ability to talk to people at all levels, from customers to directors, without confusing or being condescending!

Give me a few more details and I may be able to provide some more info!

HTH

Mike

 

[LadySlinger]

TomKane,

Depends on where you lay in the retail structure. I was originally set up as a Local Admin for a retail industry. Being the local Admin I had a lot of "Drop what you're doing and Run" on a daily basis.
My suggestion would be to get with a company at their headquarters or the district/regional branch. Since I was employed with a local office, my boss (GM) didn't know that much about computers and as a result I turned in part IT part and part secretary.
I did enjoy the people I worked with though and the job definitely kept me on my toes.

 

[TomKane]

Thanks guys for all your helpful posts.

The position is based at the head office and they have two permanent IT staff and around 500 users in four locations connected via a WAN.

They have a mixture of Unix, Novell and Windows 2000 and they are working on upgrading to an EPOS system - I had a look around the store and their current system is DOS based (I reckon Foxpro) and the teller has to key the code from the item directly into their console.