Tokyo, Japan -- NCR Japan recently installed NCR WinPOS 21, a complete OLE for Retail POS (OPOS)-based multimedia point-of-sale(POS) workstation, in the Tokorozawa branch of Seibu, a department store chain in Japan, to support one-to-one customer marketing. WinPOS21, which is part of an enterprise-wide solution developed jointly by NCR Japan and Seibu, enables Seibu to extract customer purchase history and merchandise data, stored in a data warehouse, via the Intranet/Internet. "The NCR installation at Seibu is the first and largest installation of a complete OPOS solution. All interfaces are compliant to the OPOS specification," said Rick Schultz, NCR vice president, marketing, Retail Systems Group. OPOS is a Windows-based industry standard for retail peripheral interfaces, developed to provide easier and faster integration of POS hardware components. The OPOS standard was sponsored by a consortium of companies, including Microsoft and NCR. NCR lead the architectural definition and first wide-scale installation of an OPOS-based Windows NT POS system, the firm noted in a news release. In Seibu's enterprise-wide environment, detailed customer data is collected at the WinPOS21 workstation and recorded in an electronic journal. This information is moved through NCR's wireless WaveLAN network and distributed servers running Microsoft Windows NT and NCR UNIX, providing sales associates quick access to customer and merchandise information. Seibu customer and merchandising transactions reside on an NCR WorldMark 5100M massively parallel processing (MPP) server running an Oracle database. A customer data warehouse resides on another WorldMark 5100M server running NCR's Teradata database system, to support customer marketing and merchandising analyses. Thirty WinPOS21 workstations, an NCR 3455 server and four NCR S10 segment servers were installed in the Tokorozawa store in November 1996. Seibu plans to install approximately 2,100 NCR WinPOS21 workstations throughout its 30 stores starting this Spring, building a chain-wide online system around the 5100M servers.
NCR Delivers OPOS Solution to Japanese Dept. Store Chain
January 24, 1997