STORIS Takes Collaborative Software Design to the Next Level

Furniture World News Desk on 6/28/2015

STORIS recently  announced the rollout of an enhanced Product Suggestion Portal available to all STORIS clients as of June 2015.

"STORIS has always believed in utilizing the strength behind our powerful network of home furnishings retailers. We are excited to be taking this approach to development to the next level with the Product Suggestion Portal," says Director of Product Management, Shawn McKnight, who spearheaded the project. “This community-centric tool offers an interactive approach to development. Our retailers understand the current needs of the business, and we want to give an even stronger voice to that insight. What makes the Product Suggestion Portal unique is that when clients submit their ideas, they don’t just go to our internal development team as they have in the past," he adds. "Now our entire network of retailers has the ability to vote for their favorite suggestions, make comments and post questions. This expands the collaborative nature of our software design and what it means to be a STORIS partner. The next step is getting these ideas to fruition. A scoring system will be utilized to determine a development roadmap for viable ideas. The value of a customer’s suggestion and overall impact on the customer base will be two important factors in prioritization."

"A portion of every STORIS release will have a development budget devoted specifically to the production of ideas from the Product Suggestion Portal,"  adds VP of Development Production, Dom Costantino. “We have the most aggressive release schedule in the industry, and have turned a new version of the software around every 8 months for the last ten years. STORIS has an exceptional network of retailers, and we have always encouraged our retailers to engage as a community. We service more of the Top 100 Retailers than any other software provider, yet 60% of our clients are under $15M. STORIS has solid representation from all types of retailers across the industry and want them all to leverage one another’s strengths," Constantino concludes.

“The Product Suggestion Portal really allows our development team to have a pulse on the needs of the industry with more transparency than ever before,” explains Mike Alvord, Vice President of Application Development. “We are really happy with the level of participation we have seen already. Since going live on June 16th, we’ve had many original suggestions and even more interaction through the conversations and voting. Ideas can be viewed by most recent, trending and popular. We can merge ideas that are similar or work well together to combine the strengths of suggestions. Clients can subscribe to individual ideas to receive updates from the development team, including tracking the status of their enhancement and alerts when feedback is posted," Mike concludes. 

STORIS clients can access the Product Suggestion Portal today through the client portal. 


About STORIS: Founded in 1989, STORIS continues to be the leading provider of Retail Software Solutions and Services to Big Ticket retailers of ALL sizes. Over 350 Clients utilize STORIS’ single ERP solution including point of sale, mobile processing, supply chain management, customer care, accounting, ecommerce solutions, business intelligence and more. For additional information, please visit http://www.storis.com/