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Goodwill of Central Oklahoma Selects Celerant as Point of Sale Provider
Helping Local Customers Overcome Challenges
Goodwill’s mission here in central Oklahoma is to help people overcome challenges to employment.
We’ve operated in Oklahoma for 85 years and that’s a long history of helping people. We’re excited about that, we want to keep building on that.
Manual Process that Lacked Technology
In 2020, we made the decision to move forward in identifying a point of sale and barcoding platform for our retail stores.
We started by reviewing nine different vendors, and in the end chose Celerant as the best provider to fit our needs. Our previous system had a very manual process with no technology.
We knew that there would be great value in investing into a state-of-the-art POS system that would help drive our business by collecting data and having more accuracy with our inventory and how we would manage our day-to-day business.
Point of Sale with Customization
In an average year, Goodwill Central Oklahoma is fortunate enough to receive over 600,000 product donations.
Each day, we spend the time sorting through those donations and identifying which items are best to go to the sales floor. So that means there’s a lot to go through in our production rooms.
One of the benefits that Celerant brought to the table for us in the customization process was the ability to design these screens in our production room with large buttons that were easily recognizable and allowed us to train people to be fast and accurate sooner than we would have ever imagined.
Automatic Batch Printing and Scanning
It is really taking away time that was spent on pricing our wears and our textiles.
That was a very manual process where we used a grease pencil to mark every single item, now the people working in the production area can go in and batch print tags. As soon as they select a category, it will print prices for them which makes it a lot faster to get this product to the floor.
We use a color rotation program and it’s tied to the color of the tag we placed on the product each week. Once an item’s in its fourth week on the sales floor, that item is discounted fifty percent.
Before we went to the Celerant POS system, we would have to manually enter fifty percent off after every single item. Now the cashiers just have to scan the barcode and that automatically takes the fifty percent off.
Ease of Training for New Employees
We have seen that the system is very easy to use, our cashiers have picked up on it very quickly. A typical customer transaction takes less than half the amount of time it used to take with our previous system.
Collecting Data for an Improved Customer Experience
We can now track and identify what sells best in each location, so that as we spend time collecting more and more data, we’ll be able to customize the inventory in each store to fit those customer’s needs.
Improving the Transaction Process
I’d highly recommend Celerant as a solution for your Goodwill organization. We’ve already seen a big benefit financially.
Our average customer transaction has grown by a little over a dollar already in this process. That means a lot to the organization, it means a lot to the people we serve.
We now have more funding to offer more training and more programs that can help people find the right job for them.
Streamline your Thrift Business
Learn how you can automate processes and increase sales both in store and online using Celerant’s all-in-one retail software.
