[02 September 2009]

UCS Software Manufacturing (UCSSM), the retail software factory within the JSE-listed UCS Group, has opened offices in the United States in Chicago, Illinois, as part of its plans to expand offshore.

Eric van Heerden, UCSSM’s business development executive – who heads up the USA offices – said the company will be announcing several partnership alliances over the next 12 months, with the first expected to be concluded before the end of the year.

While the company is looking at offshore business – especially in the USA – he stressed that the SA market remains “strategically important” for the company. UCS Group is currently a major player in the retail software market in Southern Africa, with more than 60% of the leading retailers as clients.

But van Heerden pointed out that the USA market is a more sophisticated and mature market, generating $3.8 trillion in retail sales annually. This figure grows to $4.2 trillion if food service sales are included.

“There is increasing demand for software solutions that meet complex, and often unique, business requirements in the retail sector in the USA, while minimizing the disruption to those businesses during the implementation, particularly under the sensitive trading conditions imposed by the recession. This makes our Assemble-to-Order (A2O) solution ideal.”

A2O is a unique and industry-leading software value-proposition targeted at Enterprise-Scale retail. It is the product of years of investment by UCSSM - The Retail Software Factory - to incorporate global best practices and two decades of retail software intellectual property into highly re-usable formats. This enables UCSSM to deliver solutions to retailers Better, Faster and Cheaper than most mainstream product alternatives in the marketplace.