Bleep Computing
“Retail outlets, whether selling designer clothing, giftware and souvenirs, admission to historic sites or pet food all have a common requirement - a sales and inventory database that is fast and reliable, and requires little or no administration. Pervasive.SQL fulfils this requirement perfectly and consistently delivers excellent results for our clients year after year.”
Ian Morris, Development Manager, Bleep Computing
About Bleep Computing
Founded in 1983 to develop EPoS (Electronic Point of Sale) software for the retail industry, Bleep Computing provides real-time solutions to manage the entire supply chain – from barcode scanning to stock control and customer profiling. With a client list that reads like a who’s who of the designer fashion industry, Bleep’s software manages retail empires belonging to Vivienne Westwood, Amanda Wakeley, Ronit Zilkha and Fred Perry. Giftware sector clients include Wimbledon Tennis Championship, The Ryder Cup, Historic Scotland and the Scottish Tourist Board. Proving that the company’s systems can just as easily scale to support hundreds of concurrent users, one of Bleep’s biggest users is Pets at Home, the UK’s largest pet care superstore chain.
With 17 employees based at two sites in London and Leeds and a distribution agreement covering the U.S. market, Bleep Computing is one of the UK’s foremost EPoS software and systems specialists. They provide consulting, development and integration services which enable retailers to conduct business in an Internet-based environment. Bleep’s expertise lies in creating supply chain solutions that allow real time ordering, delivery time reduction, inventory reduction and improved access to suppliers.
Business Challenge
One of the biggest challenges for software developers serving the retail industry is building scalable, reliable solutions with a low total cost of ownership. Cost issues are especially close to the hearts of retailers, as they try to maximize profit margins and customer satisfaction in the face of ever increasing competition.
Although they operate across a range of sectors, Bleep’s clients all have one thing in common – the need to deploy a robust, standalone stock control database at each store to enable real-time inventory management without incurring unnecessary software and hardware costs. Pervasive.SQL meets this challenge with ease, as unlike other database solutions, it does not require a dedicated server at the client end. This means that sales teams based instore, where IT staff usually is not available, do not have to concern themselves with stock reordering. Instead, the sophisticated processing takes place at the head office, where personnel can use sales data mined from the stores to identify best sellers and forecast demand levels and future trends.
“Pervasive databases embed so well into our applications that customers aren’t even aware of them, which is exactly how it should be,” said Ian Morris, development manager. “Although Pervasive might appear the unsung hero, its quality is very important for Bleep because the database is an underlying part of the whole system, and any unreliability will reflect badly on our solution as a whole.”
Pervasive.SQL as the Business Solution
Bleep’s EPoS systems have been perfected upon the Pervasive.SQL database from the outset. However, when the company ported its software to Windows in 1995 - it is now available on Windows 95, 98 and NT -, it did of course evaluate other vendors, in- cluding Microsoft. “The retail industry is changing at a rapid pace, and Bleep needs to keep up with industry developments in order to remain competitive. When the decision was made to change the platform for our software, re-evaluating our choice of database was a logical consequence. It turned out that no other vendor could match Pervasive’s impressively low license fees per workstation -- imperative when clients typically would be installing many hundreds of units -- combined with already proven stability and ease of scalability,” says Morris.
Developed in the Visual C++ environment, Bleep’s systems have proved their ability to successfully scale to manage enterprise-level retail operations. The company has been working in close partnership with Pets at Home since the retailer opened its first store in 1991. Now, with almost 200 stores across the UK and profits in excess of £6.5m, Pets at Home is still working with Bleep, and using Pervasive to drive its supply chain management.
Bottom Line
“Pervasive has continued to develop very competitive and supremely reliable data management products for the retail industry that uniquely combine technical performance with low cost of ownership. In particular Pervasive has remained committed to a steady upgrade path which is vital for Bleep in ensuring that we and ultimately our customers keep abreast of the latest trends and technological developments,” concludes Morris.
For more information
To learn more about Pervasive Software and our solutions, please visit www.pervasive.com. To reach the North American sales office, call 1.800.287.4383, extension 2. For Latin, Central and South America, Australia and New Zealand, call +1.512.231.6000. In Europe, for Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, Luxembourg, The Netherlands, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom, call +800.12.12.34.34. For any other European, Middle Eastern, African or Asian countries (excluding Japan), call +32.70.23.37.61. For Japan, please call +81.3.3293.5300, or visit www.pervasive.co.jp.
