Date: 6th October 2000

SYMICRON IS THE POWER BEHIND POWERHOUSE

Powerhouse is one of the fastest growing electrical retailers in the UK. Descended from the old-fashioned Electricity Board shops, the company is now fully independent with 126 stores covering England. Stores are a mixture of city centre premises and superstores in out-of-town retail parks. Competing successfully with Comet and Curry's, Powerhouse sells a full range of electrical appliances.

Powerhouse inherited, from its antecedents, an obsolete Unisys EPOS system running over an X.25 network, which provided considerable problems when equipping new stores because it was no longer made. With the advent of the Year 2000, the company decided to make a clean break with the old system and install a completely new system with Windows NT4 file servers and between 2 and 6 PC workstations in each store, with software supplied by Axida.

Powerhouse decided to stick with X.25 as its WAN protocol, as they were only half way through a 5-year contract with BT, and they chose Symicron X.25 cards to go in each PC. However, whereas previously the network had been purely X.25, the new network is IP over X.25 and each till has its own unique IP address. According to Paul Randell, Network Manager at Powerhouse,

"Symicron were recommended to us by Axida, who designed the system and we have been more than satisfied with the performance of their cards and the service we have received from them in solving any compatibility problems."

"The X.25 network runs at only 9600baud, which some might consider slow, but it is more than adequate for our purposes, providing full on-line credit card and cheque authorisation. After each sale the details are trickle fed to the AS/400 at Head Office, giving us real time data on current sales all over the country and enabling us to replenish stock overnight and deliver major appliances the next day, either from stock or direct from the manufacturer. Delivery labels are printed automatically by the end of the day's trading."

"At Head Office in Bicester, we also have an Action Desk, which monitors each workstation in each store via an ISDN link. We are often able to tell a store about a problem before they are even aware that there is a problem."

"The system was installed by CCA who replaced the Unisys cabling with Cat5, saving large amounts of money by using £70 standard hubs instead of special £1500 Unisys versions. CCA were able to change 3 or 4 stores a day onto the new system, with the store closing only for one afternoon and reopening the next morning. Everything was changed on the system except the receipt printers and barcode readers."

Symicron Computer Communications are on 020 8857 5577 or www.symicron.com