Retail Management Hero and RMH Central Update - June 2018

Some long awaited and much appreciated updates specific to the Retail Management Hero (RMH) and RMH Central retail point of sale software programs. Here are the bullet points and some screen caps:

• New Leadership and renewed commitment at Retail Management Hero
• Roadmap to a better and more feature rich program towards 2019/2020
• Now offering an Avalara integration (nice!)
• Q3 2018: Completely new version of RMH
• 2019: Android version
• Future Integrations (2019-2020):
• Accounting: Nav, Dynamics GP, QuickBooks Accounting
• Business Intelligence: Power BI
• E-Commerce: Shopify, Magento, Amazon, WooCommernce
• Shipping: ShipRush
• Plan to offer custom layouts and skins
• RMH Central Updates
• Beta release "soon"
• On premise/locally hosted for now - cloud version down the road
• Near real time communication using VPN/Web that is also bi-directional
• Worksheets are mainly only used for future tasks (eg: change sale price in 60 days)
• Item creation is only at the RMH Central level - not at the store level
• Can have multiple layers (eg: groups of stores, RMH Central and the RMH Central again at a higher level)

RMH Central Screen Caps (looks like RMH Manager but with the worksheets and easy to use multi-store settings):

Summary:

Overall it is very clear that the folks at Retail Realm and Retail Management Hero realize that they needed to re-commit to enhancing and stabilizing RMH in order to capture more of the 50,000 retailers world wide that use Microsoft Dynamics RMS and RMS HQ. The biggest concern at this point is that many RMS and HQ users can't wait another 2-3 years for a RMH and RMH Central to stabilize and include all the features and functions that today's retailers want and expect.

Advice:

My overall advice remains the same - if there are no compelling reasons for you to move away from RMS / HQ, then we still have until at least 2020 to keep using RMS. If you compelling reasons to replace RMS /HQ now (TLS 1.2 or 1.3, outdated hardware, credit card processing issues, missing key features/functions that are required by your organization, etc), then you will likely need to either look at Card Defender or other POS options like Cloud Retailer unless you have some fairly simple needs that can be fulfilled by RMH now.

Given that new technology and payment industry requirements may require the replacement of RMS sooner than 2020 or 2021, I would strongly advise having 2 plans in place if the initial thought is to continue using RMS for the time being. One plan would be more long term for RMS replacement and the second plan would be to replace hardware, payment processing equipment, and peripherals as needed in the interim. 

I do see RMH and RMH Central as great replacement options for RMS and HQ for retailers and franchises who can wait until the programs stabilizes and matures over the next 1-3 years.

Next Step:

Can I help? I've now worked with well over 1700 retailers using RMS (and HQ) and can provide the following in conjunction with the entire team at RITE:

• Retail POS Sales, Support and Service
• Paid onsite consulting (process documentation and improvement, ROI for a new POS system, POS feature/function/requirement wish list creation, vendor comparison, RFI/RFP/RFQ creation and review)
• Onsite POS Sales, Support and Service
• General Advice

Please do contact me at kevinantosh@gmail.com or 208-340-5632 so I can learn more about your business and specific goals.