Eason & Son
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| Eason and Son Limited | |
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| Type | Private |
|---|---|
| Founded | 1886 |
| Headquarters |  Dublin, Republic of Ireland |
| Industry | Retail Wholesale IT Solutions Advertising |
| Products | Books Stationery Newspaper Cards and gifts Toys |
Eason & Son (or Eason's as it is more commonly known) is a group involved in the wholesale, distribution and retail of newspapers, magazines, books, stationery and cards in the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland.
The chain of 58[citation needed] Eason stores exist throughout the island of Ireland. The company is headquartered in Dublin and employs over 1,800 staff. The company, which is privatly owned, had a profit of €9.7m in 2003 on a turnover of €372m. Recently, the company has moved into franchising, with a number of new retail units operating independently under the Eason banner. Most of these are located in shopping centres or smaller towns which do not already have an existing Eason shop. Basil McAllister is Managing Director. Michael Ryder is Chairman.
Contents |
[edit] List of divisions, ownership of other companies and acquisitions
Eason Retail Division - currently based in O'Connell Street, but due to move to an integrated book, magazine and stationery warehouse in St Margaret's, Dublin in mid-2007.
Eason Wholesale Stationery Division, currently based in Crumlin, Dublin 12, distributes Stationery and associated products to retail outlets throughout the 32 counties.
Eason Wholesale Book Division - currently based in Santry, north County Dublin. This division sells books in bulk to many shops.
Reads - These stores, acquired in 2005, are primarily discount stores selling stationery, books and greetings cards. The two original Reads stores were on Nassau Street in Dublin 2 ( located beside the Eason Fred Hanna's bookshop , itself acquired by Eason from the Hanna family in 1999), and a branch on Patrick street in Cork city. A former Eason store on Botanic Avenue in Belfast was converted in 2006.
- Eason's Advertising Services Limited - a niche advertising agency, one of the oldest agencies in the country and a wholly-owned subsidiary ([1]). Located in Dublin.
Eason Electronic - 2 South African Companies selling phone top-ups and pre-paid electricity
52 British Bookshops & Sussex Stationers outlets in south-east England. Contributed a large share of corporate profits in 2005.
- N.P.O. UK Ltd. (now all rebranded Eason)
[edit] Distribution and wholesale services
Eason has a newspaper and magazine distribution service in Ireland which competes with Menzies Distribution, Wholesale Newspaper Services and News Speed. Eason delivers newspapers and magazines to its own stores as well as other non-Eason stores. Popular newspapers that Eason distributes include The Daily Mail, Daily Express, The Guardian, The Times, The Daily Telegraph and others. Eason also delivers The Belfast Telegraph to its own stores only within Northern Ireland.
- Eason News Distribution Division - based in Dublin, and outside Cork City Newsbrothers. Newsbrothers , a subsidiary company of Eason, is responsible for newspaper and magazine distribution in the Munster region. Also, a small news warehouse facility is located at Mervue in Galway city.
- Eason and Son (N.I.) Ltd - This division operates both the Northern Ireland wholesale distribution arm and the Northern Ireland retail arm, (28 branches - 48% of the company's total stores in the smallest area). This is partly due to the takeover of the company "N.P.O. UK Ltd" which specialised in stationery. (n.b. Eason & Son Ltd. owns two companies with this name - one registered in Northern Ireland and one registered in the Republic of Ireland).
As of February 2007 Eason is in the process of merging its newspaper and magazine wholesale distribution businesses into a joint venture with John Menzies to be called EM News Distribution.[1]
[edit] Technical
Eason tills use "APS PayPoint" software which is used on dedicated ePOS hardware manufactured by Epson however some ex-NPO branch use PayPoint on standard PCs manufactured by HP.
Credit Card hardware is separate from the tills and is manufactured by Ingenico Fortronic. Eason has now integrated credit card processing into its tills in some of its stores using the dedicated Epson hardware. Tills using standards PCs have also been upgraded. Bigger branches host a credit card authorisiation server where smaller shops connect to it via a VPN tunnel.
Since 2005, Eason has also integrated the automated selling of gift cards into tills, using similar technology; the giftcard system uses PayPlus software also developed by APS. Staff can now swipe giftcards to top them up and also use them as payment for all items in Eason stores throughout Ireland.
EROS (Eason Remote Ordering System) is the company's system for ordering books and stationery. EROS is a Microsoft Windows application which as well as ordering, allows staff to check stock on books. The EROS database stores all books currently available at the Eason warehouse in Dublin as well as holding stock counts for the respective shop. This database is stored on a server located in each store. Shop staff can place orders on client machines located on the shop floor; this updates the EROS database's "books waiting to be ordered" list. The manager will authorise the order at the earliest opportunity and send the order to the warehouse. At the same time, an update may be executed which updates the shop server's database and synchronizes it with books available at the warehouse. EROS does not make use of a pernament connection to the internet or any ISP as the order processing/update is done directly via the PSTN network to the warehouse server; consequently, this results in EROS not being able to check stock in other shops.
Eason's internal phone system vary between different shops. For example, ex-NPO shops tend to use Panasonic A309 telephone systems but the shops that were always Eason tend to use BT meridian systems.
Most shops have broadband which enables each shop to authorise credit card transactions, gift cards as well as administrative tasks.
[edit] EasonNews
EasonNews is a program used by Eason Carryduff to organise their news listings; it helps staff lookup a paticular title for a customer as well as aid with magazine/newspaper recalls.
The system is based on the 3-tier client/server system called "ABPNI Database"; the server machine queries a MYSQL database and then sends the results to the client program (shown left).
[edit] Stationery
Eason is the official distributor in Ireland for Club Stationery which is sold throughout its own stores as well as many other non-Eason outlets.
[edit] See also
[edit] References
- ^ Kehoe, Ian. "Eason and Menzies sign joint distribution deal", Sunday Business Post, Financial Times Information, 2007-01-14. Retrieved on February 27, 2007.
[edit] External links
Eason & Son: A History by L M Cullen. (438pp, 16 plates Dublin 1989.)
