It’s almost like the developers have worked in retail - Last Yard is so attuned to what we are doing and what we need. The platform makes an arduous and laborious job fast and easy, with less time spent on getting it right and more time for other things, above all our customers.
Tristan Gallagher
Process Improvement Analyst
About Bing Lee
Bing Lee is an Australian electronics retailer, focused on providing customers with affordable products.
Retail Segment: Electrical
Number of Stores: 34
Location: Australia
Company size: Mid market
Bing Lee’s ticketing process was based on centrally printing promotional material and sending it to stores. Because there was no way to identify specific-store inventories, every store received an exhaustive database of all products and all price changes.
Stores were then required to print everything, sort through the tickets to pick out what was relevant to them, and discard the rest. The time-consuming, wasteful process left staff less time to help customers. To prepare for larger sales promotions, more staff working longer hours were needed to complete the significant in-store labour required.
Another challenge for Bing Lee was keeping up with missing or incorrect tickets. These mistakes could only be discovered one by one – sometimes by frustrated customers – and then required staff to write down corrected product information and manually enter all the details into the system. Then they’d have to print it and physically replace the shelf ticket.
As the store network grew, the negative impact of this inefficient, unscalable, outdated process grew with it.
Through Integration and automation, Bing Lee significantly reduced waste and manual labour
Last Yard integrated Bing Lee’s point of sale (POS) and product information management (PIM) systems. This means that head office and individual stores are both working from the same single source of truth: a real-time database with accurate information for all current promotions. Now stores only receive pricing and sale material relevant to their specific stock-on-hand.
Categorised ticket batches mean no waste: everything printed at an individual store is relevant to that store. Bing Lee estimates that the platform has saved 10,000 hours per year on in-store promotional costs – about $250,000 in annual savings. Customer service has also improved now that staff can better focus on helping customers.
Bing Lee can stay competitive by immediately responding to price changes
Pricing agility is essential for Bing Lee to stay competitive. It’s important for stores to ensure that highly fluid pricing is consistent both in-store and online.
The Last Yard platform provides Bing Lee’s head office with comprehensive oversight: both over the assignment of pricing changes to individual stores and reporting on which have been actioned and printed. At each store, the software indicates which ticket batches require printing and distribution to the shop floor. Stores can be confident that all changes and tickets provided are specifically relevant to them.
Missing or incorrect ticketing information can now be corrected in minutes
Last Yard’s Mobile Scanner Software is a powerful tool across the Bing Lee store network, instantly addressing missing or incorrect tickets. The efficient and innovative solution takes about two minutes to complete a task that used to take 30. Staff now simply scan product barcodes on the shop floor into the Last Yard platform and can make on-the-spot changes using hip printers.
The Last Yard platform makes a big difference compared to the old solution. We were so impressed seeing that we had capabilities that the old system didn’t - you don’t know any differently and someone shows something much better, it’s refreshing.
Tristan Gallagher
Process Improvement Analyst