Openbravo
Accelerating Retail Ops with All-Inclusive POS

Slow-footed advancements in the retail POS industry suggest that the space is ripe for disruption. A global cloud-based omnichannel platform vendor Openbravo offers the Openbravo Commerce Cloud (OCC), to help retailers realize this reorientation. Marco de Vries, CEO of Openbravo, states that the company was created to answer this absence of adaptable POS solutions for better digital experiences, personalization, and convenience. Without such a solution, the adoption of an omnichannel approach and the transformation of retailers, legacy IT operations and support for sophisticated business requirements, are stifled. “Old school” POS systems make better customer experience solutions inaccessible to cloud and mobile technologies, optimized IT budgets, and hinder agility and faster innovation. “With OCC, we provide a rich combination of omnichannel functionality with agility and flexibility of clients’ mobile-enabled and cloud-ready modular technology platform,” Vries adds. In this situation, Openbravo unleashes their expertise in cloud and mobile technologies into the space by delivering their omnichannel platform, enabling faster deployments, which reduce time-to-value, facilitates efficient introduction of new features, and ultimately optimizes IT maintenance costs. With single-point integration potential, this cloud offering provides easier and faster connections with other systems.

Established in 2006, Openbravo has evolved as a fast-growing vendor with 400 customers in several verticals—sporting goods, fashion, furniture, electronics, opticians, and F&B. Having offices in Dubai, France, India, Mexico, and Spain, they support 18,000 back office users and 30,000 POS terminals. “Our growth was confirmed in 2018 with the opening of two new offices in France and Dubai and 70 percent annual growth in retail software subscription,” says Vries. Their strong client coterie and market traction created by their cloud offering with new and existing retail customers, effectuated this ramp-up.
To achieve their objective, the company offers its primary retail offering, Openbravo POS, as a full-web and mobile-enabled POS solution, which allows retail and restaurant chains to deliver personalized and innovative customer experiences. The platform includes OMS, CRM & Clienteling, merchandise management, warehouse, and inventory management. The platform’s mobile feature allows adoption of cost-effective POS terminals during peak situations, reducing hardware investment. It also provides stock accuracy by executing inventory tasks from mobile devices and increases customer satisfaction by enabling personalized service from anywhere in the store. At Openbravo, mobility is coupled with 100 percent web capability to reroute the need for software installation on each device, further simplifying maintenance.

With its highly customizable user interface, Openbravo POS was designed to align well with the principles of Progressive Web Applications (PWA). It eliminates the need for local IT infrastructures and is equipped with an offline resistant technology, which allows sales even during connectivity loss. By supporting hybrid deployment scenarios, it possesses greater flexibility to work with central cloud servers and local store servers.

Openbravo POS is also highly modular, being able to support specific business needs, as it is easily extendable and maintainable.

It reduces development time for new functionalities and facilitates faster pilot executions. Openbravo POS is deployed on virtual servers with a highly secure and flexible Openbravo Cloud, a Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), which is maintained, updated, and monitored by the firm. This coupled with the firm’s customizable connectors simplifies the integration.

We provide a rich combination of omnichannel functionality with agility and flexibility of their mobile-enabled and cloud-ready modular technology platform

Furthermore, Openbravo POS has a rich front-office and back-office functional footprint and offers mobile POS functionality to multiple terminals—mobile and desktop. This includes timely notifications to associates on existing complementary products, services, and applicable discounts, helping to increase up-selling and cross-selling opportunities. Openbravo POS’s flexibility, pricing and discounting engine simplifies assortment management complexities and pushes the changes made in the back-office to all or a subset of locations and terminals in near real-time. Its back office capabilities include advanced mobile in-store inventory management and support to omnichannel scenarios. By supporting a wide variety of delivery and payment methods—standard and mobile payment—and self-service terminals, it offers a faster and convenient checkout experience. Openbravo POS provides real-time sales and inventory visibility for better decision making, and easier creation of new locations and terminals.

With such a value-bound suite of solutions, Openbravo has offered its POS to a wide range of customers, including Toys “R” Us Iberia, Decathlon, Cirque du Soleil and Boots Opticians UK. To broaden its client base, the firm is developing new stylish and personalizable POS user interfaces. They are on a drive to improve their self-service solution while delivering connectors having additional payment solutions. The company is launching an improved reporting solution and order management system (OMS) to support more advanced omnichannel scenarios. “We are also extending our Cloud offering with new services and will be soon launching support to Microsoft Azure, which will expand our current support to AWS,” concludes Vries.