MONTREAL, PQ / BALTIMORE, MD (May 18, 2010) - Shoe City (ESCO Ltd.) operates 28 stores in Maryland, District of Columbia and Richmond and Tidewater Virginia. For ESCO, the past few years have been a constant exercise of maintaining tight controls on merchandising and store operations.

"We are proud of our success. We partnered with Gemmar Systems International (GSI) to be our software solution over 10 years ago and have never looked back. From the very beginning Retail-1 has allowed us to increase our gross profits with better merchandising and inventory management," said Michael Fortwengler, Chief Financial Officer. "The Integrated Open to Buy Planning system has provided the discipline required to keep inventories at optimum levels and the Executive Information System allowed us to monitor the key performance indicators including store, vendor and product. We are on top of our priorities and monitor our performance objectives every week."

"We regularly review our use of systems and seek additional ways we can improve our results," said Michael Fortwengler. "Our relationship with GSI enables us to focus on continuous improvement. GSI conducts regular audits on our use of the system and provides written recommendations for areas of improvements. Two areas that were recently addressed were Traffic and Warehouse Management. When inventory is under control you look for other areas in the organization that can feed the bottom line. Traffic knowledge is one of these areas and being able to fully understand the staffing needs by store by hour allowed us to achieve substantial savings. We also upgraded our Warehouse Management System to GSI's new eShipper Module and took advantage of the new functionality and paperless environment."

When E-Commerce became a priority topic, we once again turned to GSI for a possible solution. "The e-Commerce project was the next logical step for us, mandating GSI was the easiest decision we ever made. GSI already has the back-end solution and we would have required them to interface with an e-commerce provider, so we thought we would eliminate the complexity and give them the opportunity to meet our e-commerce needs. We are confident they will deliver far beyond our expectations."

 

Michael Fortwengler commented "Customer Loyalty, user friendliness, and an efficient shopping experience are the keys to any successful website.Our ability to marry all databases to such an extreme level will provide us with the capabilities to offer functionality that is unparalleled on other sites. I am especially excited about one of our new concepts; Your Personalized Closet," said Peter Mitelman, President of GSI.

For more information on Gemmar Systems International (GSI), call Steve Carlson at 514-631-3336 Ext. 2240 or e-mail sales@gsi.ca or visit www.gemmar.com. For sales assistance in the U.S., contact J.D. Associates at 800-564-4488 or POSinfo@jdapos.com . Visit J.D. Associates at www.jdapos.com For additional information on ESCO Ltd. (Shoe City), visit www.shoecityonline.com or call Michael Fortwengler at 410-944-1666.