Don’t forget the front line people when accessing your POS needs

I’m in the midst of building a needs document for two clients as an evaluation tool for a new POS system. We are working together to gather all the relevant information on inventory, purchasing and receiving, the reports they use, e-commerce and customer tracking. All this documentation will be very helpful in developing a detailed system requirement document for perspective vendors. What typically are given short shrift are the needs of the front people on the sales floor. Building a comprehensive RFP requires documenting all the backend processes and procedures but in addition a lot of attention should be paid to the customer facing technology requirements. The competition for customers is more aggressive than ever. They want to be recognized are frequent shoppers, they want to be rewarded for their loyalty, they want product information available to them before and during the sales process and they want be able order online and pick it up at the store or have it shipped from another store. All these features are no longer nice to have requirements they are necessities in today’s super competitive environment. The front end or POS station is where the action is so pay close attention and document the features you need, that’s where the tire meets the road.