Wallace Associates, LTD.

Situation:
Wallace Associates, headquartered in Maitland, FL, was founded by W.N. Wallace, after a successful career at Florsheim Shoes, in 1972. Wallace develops and markets their own private labeled men’s shoes and operates three different companies that are reported separately and consolidated in a single financial system:

• Cohn Turner
• Wallace Shoes – Wallace Leased Shoe locations & Famous Shoes
• Hot Springs

Cohn Turner is a full high end men’s clothing store located in Baton Rouge, LA. Cohn Turner makes merchandising, purchasing, receiving, and point of sale decisions, while corporate handles their accounts payable. Cohn Turner was operating manually and was using an expensive third party to manage their accounts receivables.

Wallace Leased Shoes operates 13 leased shoe departments located in men’s clothing stores. Wallace employees manage operations, sell shoes, and pass the shoes along with a receipt to the retailer for final checkout and payment. Corporate purchases shoes for the locations, most of which are dropped shipped to the stores, and replenishes their inventories. Famous Shoes located in Sarasota, FL is a full men’s and women’s shoe store.

The shoe business, which did have a home grown POS system, was experiencing inventory and inventory replenishment problems. Their system did not support purchasing, receiving and automated replenishment. This resulted in the creation of manual processes and added to their operating costs.

Hot Springs is located in Sarasota, FL and is a spa, spa parts and spa chemical retailer. It did not have a computerized system.

Wallace was looking for a system to resolve these issues while supporting the three separate companies. They also needed a system that would feed financial data into a new financial system. In addition, Wallace was seeking to replace an old AS400 that was running their financial application.

Solution:
Wallace selected and implemented UTC RETAIL’s Merchant POS/ Retail Management System in their 16 different locations in August 2006.

Merchant allows Wallace’s corporate management to get a total view of all three businesses. It also allows them to manage the purchasing and distribution for the shoe lines, to provide warehousing and distribution for some brands of shoes, and to fulfill special order requests from the various stores.

Cohn Turner and Hot Springs used Merchant’s full POS and retail management functions, including the UTC RETAIL gift card system and the Merchant Accounts Receivable module, to replace their third party AR agency.

The Merchant Financial Bridge sends sales, markdowns, returns, cost of goods, vendor and payables financial transactions for the three companies into their general ledger and accounts payable system.

Results:
Wallace saw immediate results with tighter control over their inventory and the ability to quickly and easily make decisions to balance inventory across their locations. The reduction in manual posting to their general ledger and accounts payable allowed them to absorb the accounts receivable function and eliminated the third party cost. The Merchant merchandise reporting system now provides timely and improved reporting to make merchandising decisions.

W.N. Wallace, Owner of Wallace Associates, said: “Not only have we eliminated third party costs, but information is now at our finger tips to resolve vendor issues and understand our customer history and inventory position. This better equips us to manage our retail business. UTC RETAIL has provided excellent initial and on-going support to help us achieve our business objectives”.