WUSA runs its campus retail, food service and events on one system
In 2016, WUSA replaced all its IT with one system from LS Retail. The move brought its shops, café, pub and other services together, and WUSA also uses it for events, ticketing, room bookings and rentals.
One overview instead of five
WUSA used to pull reports from five separate back offices in five different formats and piece them together by hand. Now it works from one. "LS Central has massively simplified our work," says Prashant Kumar Patel, Director of Operations and Development at WUSA. "Now we go into the back office (just the one!) and pull out reports that give us real insights on which we can act."
One system across services
With LS Central, WUSA manages retail, food service and hospitality in the same system, and extended it to run events, ticketing, venue bookings and rentals. "Now we can manage our retail, foodservice and hospitality in the same software system, which is brilliant," says Patel. That single, accurate overview lets the team see what is happening across the business and act on it.
Fast service at peak
WUSA’s busiest stores handle heavy traffic. "On an average day, we can get over 2000 customers in one store, that means hundreds of transactions per hour," says Patel. "Our old system would slow down, and we’d have queues. Not with LS Central. Everything just works." Since the switch, business performance has improved in profitability, cost recovery, margins and customer experience.
What was holding the business back
For years, WUSA ran multiple standalone systems for its food-service and retail operations, which made it hard to manage the business. Reporting meant logging into five back offices and reconciling five formats by hand, and every new outlet meant adding yet another system. The constant maintenance created manual work and duplicate tasks, produced unreliable information, and left student services slow and inefficient.
The decision and the foundation
WUSA chose the LS Retail system to fix and update its processes in one place, then extended it well beyond retail and food service. "The unified commerce solutions from LS Retail were the one-two punch that we needed to get our processes fixed and modernized," says Patel. "We also thought, why don’t we use it for our events, ticketing, room bookings, and rentals? This is all functionality that LS Central offers."
Q&A: insights from WUSA's implementation
Why did WUSA change systems?
WUSA ran multiple standalone systems for food service and retail that made the business hard to manage. Reporting meant reconciling five back offices by hand, each new outlet added another system, and the maintenance produced manual work, unreliable data and slow student services.
What does WUSA run now?
WUSA runs LS Central across retail, food service and hospitality, and also uses it for events, ticketing, room bookings and rentals, with reporting from a single back office.
How has the system affected service and reporting?
WUSA now pulls reports from one back office instead of five and gets a single, trustworthy overview. Its busiest stores handle hundreds of transactions an hour without the slowdowns and queues of the old systems.
