Ihad the pleasure of working with Lightspeed Retail POS during my time at Herschel. Lightspeed Retail is a SAAS based point of sale platform that is great for small to medium sized outfits. As the primary resource from IT on the project, I set up the entire platform for the company’s first five stores.
One unique aspect about these store projects was that I didn’t just deal with Lightspeed. I handled the procurement and management of all technology in our stores such as POS hardware, network equipment, internet services, payment processing, traffic counters and audio-video (video walls).
Within Lightspeed, I helped design and manage the database of products and inventory to ensure it integrated with the ERP system. In addition, I supported all users at HQ and in-store.
The types of information I dealt with in the context of Lightspeed included:
- Product information and pricing - this involved setting up product in a flat structure but support our matrix of product sizes
- Sales transaction data which needed to land in our ERP system as soon as possible
- Inventory data so that stores could order from a central warehouse from within Lightspeed
- Reporting on all sorts of measures related to sales and conversion
Interestingly, Lightspeed eventually purchased NuORDER which was quite a trip! I’ve worked so closely with both platforms but in completely separate contexts (Lightspeed being direct-to-consumer and NuORDER being wholesale) and I’m interested to see how they bring the two platforms together in the future.
Here's a great article showcasing the first store which I got to work on in 2018!