Cargokids! chooses GERS’ Electronic Retail Enterprise to provide building blocks for growing retail business

Furniture World Magazine

GERS Retail Systems, a leading supplier of business solutions for the retail industry, today announced that Cargokids!, a retailer of children’s furniture and accessories, has selected the GERS Electronic Retail Enterprise to replace their existing legacy system. Cargokids!, a wholly owned subsidiary of Pier 1 Imports, will implement GERS’ Enterprise1 for Big Ticket with Radio Frequency (RF) Warehousing, PLANalyst, RetailAnalyst, and Customer1. With these solutions, Cargokids! will leverage GERS’ next-generation, point-of-service solution to consolidate all data into an integrated retail system, improve merchandise planning and performance analysis, and optimize sales channels to increase profitability and support long-term business growth. “Cargokids! has an extensive five-year growth plan, and needed to replace their legacy system with a proven solution that could scale to meet their growing needs,” said Andy Laudato, Senior Vice President and CIO of Pier 1 Imports, Cargokids!’ parent company. “With GERS Retail Systems, Cargokids! can build a systems infrastructure that will support their growth as they add new stores and integrate sales channels.” By implementing Enterprise1, Cargokids! will integrate all merchandising, distribution, and financial data into a centralized, real-time environment for immediate information retrieval and reduced manual processing. With GERS’ fully integrated RF Warehousing module, Cargokids! will automate warehousing and distribution operations to enhance productivity, ensure accurate order fulfillment, and eliminate invoicing errors. Cargokids! will also take advantage of Enterprise1’s extensive reporting capabilities, and interface with Pier 1 Imports’ financial systems to share financial and sales information with the parent company. Leveraging data stored in Enterprise1, Cargokids! will implement PLANalyst Merchandise Planning and Allocation, a fully integrated solution that can dynamically forecast, create, analyze, and manage merchandise plans to reduce inventory levels, increase turns, and develop more profitable customer relationships. Cargokids! will also use RetailAnalyst, GERS’ intuitive business intelligence solution, to quickly and easily analyze sales, inventory, and vendor data; identify trends; and maximize sales opportunities. “With these analytical tools from GERS, we will be able to improve planning and forecasting across our organization for greater inventory control, and validate our merchandising strategies as we continue to grow our business,” said Paul Mihic, President of Cargokids!. “We’re also looking forward to implementing a new point-of-service solution that will integrate our multiple sales channels for increased customer satisfaction and loyalty and greater gross margin return on investment.” On the front end, Cargokids! will implement Customer1, GERS’ new point-of-service solution. Built on next-generation technology, Customer1 will give Cargokids! the ability to capture sales and customer data once from any store, channel, or device, and instantly share that information throughout the enterprise to increase average sales orders and deliver improved customer service at the point of sale. “Cargokids! offers their customer a unique assortment of children’s furniture and accessories across several sales channels in a nationally fragmented niche,” said Jim Henderson, President and CEO of GERS Retail Systems. “After a thorough search, they found our solutions to be the sound choice for their expanding retail business, and we look forward to providing them with a platform to support their continued growth.” About Cargokids: Founded in 1980, Cargokids! is a retailer of children's furniture and accessories. Cargokids! products are sold through 17 company-owned retail stores, contract sales, and a toll-free ordering division. In January 2001, Cargokids! was acquired by Pier 1 Imports (www.pier1.com), North America's largest specialty retailer of imported decorative home furnishings and accessories with more than 900 stores. Cargokids! is headquartered in Fort Worth, Texas, and employs almost 200 associates at its home office and in its retail stores located in Georgia, Kansas, Maryland, Texas and Virginia. For more information, visit www.Cargokids.com. About GERS Retail Systems: With over 28 years of experience and 300 installations worldwide, GERS Retail Systems is a leading supplier of software solutions for the retail marketplace. The GERS Electronic Retail Enterprise includes mission-critical transaction management applications for multi-channel retailing, and provides fully integrated corporate office applications for merchandise replenishment and allocation, distribution center management, and financial control. Integral to the GERS solution set are Business Intelligence applications for predictive modeling and decision support, Merchandise Planning and Allocation for increasing returns on inventory investments, and Workflow Automation applications for maximizing productivity across the enterprise. For more information, visit www.gers.com.