Starting in FY’04 The United Group in MA will be instituting a State of the Art Automated Point of Sale (POS) system to manage the reception, extraction, rotation, and replenishment of our restricted POS inventory. We have two full-time dedicated employees responsible for the physical management of the POS area of our warehouse.

Our POS inventory is held in a 50,000 sq.ft area of our warehouse and is split into two distinct sections, (1) Self Service and (2) Restricted Access.
The Self Service area consists of primarily paper goods including case cards, certain Mass Display pieces received in large quantities, and other bulk POS utilized in OFF-Premise accounts. Within the Self Service area there is also section devoted exclusively to shelf talkers, table tents, and customized sign retrieval. This affords our sales people and merchandising team easy, efficient access to POS items necessary for maintaining floor space in our accounts without the hassle of waiting for assistance!

The Restricted Access area of the POS department consists primarily of high value items including certain electronic products, furniture pieces, all wearables, and outdoor equipment dealer loader items and various other high end POS items including racks, champagne buckets etc. The POS Manager of your particular selling division can add additional items to our restricted access area at your discretion and upon review.

The automation of the Restricted POS will allow our sales force to access the inventory and request an item through the designated managers from each selling division to monitor and track the execution and inventory. Features of the automation include:

1. Standard Form for receiving and entering POS into our system.
2. Management of inventory through designated exact locations in our warehouse.
3. Diver Sales Software analysis of POS inventory drilled down to the account level.

Benefits of Automation

1. The automation of the POS area will alleviate the communication confusion associated
   with the reception and extraction of POS.
2. The automation of the POS area will allow for active and automatic management of POS inventory from both a seasonal and replenishment perspective in both the self-service and caged in areas.
3. The automation of the POS area will create efficiencies with respect to the reception of new POS and the disposal of out of date items.
4. The automation of the POS area will ease the burden faxing and searching out POS forms for approval and execution.
5. The automation of the POS area will allow management to track the flow of POS down to the customer level (via Diver) ensuring the highest return possible of supplier POS spending.
6. The automation of the POS area will create efficiencies with respect to the execution of non self-service display bookings with Merchandisers.
7. The automation of the POS area will provide the opportunity for quick turnaround of dealer loader and other such programs by the sales force to the customer.