Russian retailers and press showed up to the annual LS Retail Conference in Moscow, under the theme “LS Retail – Technology Leadership”

Presentations were made by Evgeniy Kutnetzov, Impact Soft, Birger Steen, General Manager of Microsoft Russia, Evgeniy Yankov, Oxana Vigante of Pharmacy chain Vitim, and Jerry Rudicer of Coffee Bean Russia.

The Russian market is the 10th largest retail market in the world and therefore very interesting for Landsteinar Strengur. However, Russia also gives big challenges to foreign software developers:

- Localization of LS Retail to meet local requirements
- Development of adaptation for different tax rules and official approval
- Local language and character set
- Creation of market awareness for the product, and attract customers and partners
- Installation and support for customers in a country with 10 time zones

Since 2000, Impact Soft has made great efforts to address these challenges. The technical and commercial staff has been intensively trained to focus on the retail market with great success:

- LS Retail 4.10 is the 6th version of LS Retail that Impactsoft has localized and the Russian version is getting better and better.
- There is a network of partners who sell, implement and support LS Retail all over Russia and the former CIS.
- More than 40 customers operating over 400 stores have implemented LS Retail.
- The solution is installed in many different areas of retail, for example Supermarkets, Fashion, Electronics and Pharmacies.
- Among the customers there are famous international brands such as Bestseller, Mexx and adidas, but also leading Russian companies such as the Vitim pharmacies, Vesch and Arbat Prestige.

“The Russian Retail market is currently booming with annual growth rates of over 30%”, says Birger Steen of Microsoft Russia. “The retail market is heavily fuelled by the increased purchase power of the fast growing middle class in Russia. Microsoft Russia is happy to see how Impact Soft and Landsteinar Strengur are approaching the market with LS Retail. Impact Soft sold 8 new LS Retail installations in 2006. This clearly proves that LS Retail has become a very attractive solution for the Russian market.”

Jerry Rudicer of Coffee Bean Russia states: “Coffee Bean has been in the Russian market for 11 years. During this period, Coffee Bean has tried several hospitality systems, but we were never really satisfied with our solutions. Currently we are experiencing problems with data replication and stability. This is the reason why we turned to Microsoft and Impact Soft to find a standard solution that is stable and easy for us to use. Ours is the first installation of LS Retail Hospitality in Russia, and it looks like the standard functionality fits our needs and that this is a good platform for our future growth not just in Moscow, but in the rest of Russia as well. LS Retail Hospitality was in operation in the first Coffee House three weeks after we made the decision to implement Microsoft Dynamics NAV and LS Retail.


Oxana Vigante IT Department Director, Vitim Pharmacies says: “Vitim has the highest revenue per pharmacy in Russia, and therefore the POS solution must be very fast, stable and flexible. With more than 100 distributed databases it is vital for us to have a reliable data exchange mechanism without requirements for expensive communication lines. The project started in July 2006. In the following two months, Impact Soft made customizations according to our needs and the first pharmacy went live in September. The customizations have made it possible to us to replace local solutions, especially developed for pharmacies with LS Retail. We believe that we have found the functionality and architecture we need with Microsoft Dynamics NAV and LS Retail. Today we have 19 pharmacies in operation, and we expect to increase number rapidly.”