Best foot forward for Begg Shoes in Inverness as it invests in new technology
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A ground-breaking computer system will revolutionise an Inverness business.
Family owned Begg Shoes is working on a database content management system that will help manage stock, as well as using artificial intelligence (AI) to order what the customer really wants.
Donald Begg, the company's managing director, said that working with The Data Lab, would ultimately allow the business to free up his time to open more stores.
The shoe shop can trace its roots in Inverness more than 150 years, and at the moment has nine stores, two in Inverness and around the north of Scotland, employing 50 people.
Investing in "blockchain" and "eventchain" technology will offer significant opportunities for the business. Blockchain is essentially a digital ledger of events that happen in the purchase and sale of a product.
Mr Begg said: "We have invested in high street shops for our business, and we run a successful online sales business, where we use the shop staff and stock to sell to a much wider market.
"In the past all of our information would have been kept on paper, then on Excel spreadsheets and now we are looking at new ways of using technology to create an even bigger international market for our shoes. In doing so we want to have a system that does the hard work for us, to free up our time to grown the business.
“It is effectively using blockchain within a small business environment, which to the best of my knowledge I don’t think many business in Scotland have attempted,” said Mr Begg "It will allow us to keep the high street stores while growing the online business. Our database will be able to integrate with other systems.
“It is very ambitious. There is a reason why blockchain is used by the big guys of tech, and there is a reason why it is difficult to access as a small business. But the guys we are working with, and us as a family, are confident we are getting quite close now to system that is functioning and live and would allow us to operate in a retail environment that has so many different potential shops and different potential ways of marketing ourselves as a business.”
Mr Begg, who hopes the system will go live later this year, said: "The technology will allow us to use our unique business information to be able to directly speak to Facebook, Google, Amazon, eBay, which are all big drivers these days of e-commerce.
"We can also develop technology that will allow us to use artificial intelligence to order stock, a task that at the moment takes up 80 per cent of my time. If we improve the way we use our time, we can free up staff time to grow the business. ”
Some retailers are losing up to 30 per cent of the value of their stock because they are unable to track their assets effectively, Mr Begg said. “That really gives us an edge on gross profit margin over other retailers because we know what has happened to each individual asset, and we can manage them effectively".
