Retail Store Solutions, (RSS,) develops hardware and software for the retail industry. Based in Research Triangle Park near Raleigh, North Carolina, this US based IBM organization has been providing solutions for the retail industry in the Unites States, and eventually worldwide, for over thirty years.
By David Chakmakian, RSS Globalization Site Coordinator |
Sometime during the mid-1980's, RSS began translating and delivering software products such as their proprietary 4690 Retail operating system for Point of Sale (POS) hardware to several countries. They started with Danish, French-Canadian, French, German, and Spanish. In later years, components of 4690 were translated into languages for Asia Pacific including Japanese, Chinese, and Korean.
Around that time RSS also translated their Applications that run on the 4690 O/S such as Supermarket Application, (SA,) General Sales Application, (GSA,) and many of their features. At one point, SA was translated into sixteen languages: Bulgarian, French-Canadian, Simplified and Traditional Chinese, Czech, Danish, French, German, Hungarian, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Portuguese, Spanish, Swedish, and Turkish.
In the new millennium, RSS translated their powerful ACE application and the Graphic User Interface of the Store Integration Framework into Spanish, and their newly acquired VisualStore product into nine languages. VisualStore was unique in that it was developed in Europe and the target market was ONLY overseas - there was no US version of the product.
Newer products such as RSS's Linux-based Point of Sale solution were designed and developed with the international customer in mind, and were translated into several languages for IBM's non-English speaking retail customers. |
RSS has developed many POS hardware solutions including sales terminals and their controllers as well as proprietary printers and scanners. Some of the publications for these devices such as user guides and reference manuals have been translated into as many as twenty languages so that international users could benefit from the products.
RSS also produces hardware specific to certain countries. Some countries in Europe have Fiscal laws that dictate how monetary transactions are handled, such as journaling requirements of register receipts, etc. RSS develops and delivers special fiscal models of their printers specific to those countries' requirements. As Fiscal laws change, or as countries develop new Fiscal laws, RSS is poised to offer solutions. |
