The award-winning Ringwood store in Australia .
Investing in our stores
As more and more people choose Specsavers , we need to make sure our stores can continue to provide the very best customer experience . This means opening new stores , and expanding and refitting existing ones . It also means innovating processes and investing heavily in technology to increase efficiency and improve our service to customers – in short , getting the infrastructure in place to future-proof the business .
We are in the process of replacing our clinical and retail systems with a new Cloud-hosted solution . The new system will enable us to handle greater volumes and provide a more seamless experience for customers , providing the platform for new digital developments in store . The roll-out in New Zealand is now complete and will be followed by its introduction to our Northern Europe region in the coming year .
Enhancing our supply chain
We continue to invest in and develop our supply chain to ensure we are able to support business growth amid changing regulatory demands , as well as providing exceptional service to our customers .
We invested heavily in our Chinese sites during the past year in order to support increasing demand in Australia and New Zealand , as well as create greater flexibility that means some product ranges can be manufactured in specific regions and distributed throughout our global network . We installed a new coating facility in Advance Vision International , which has a 25,000-lens-perweek capacity , and we are currently relocating another operation to a new facility in China . The new facility features the latest in optical manufacturing technology and will help future-proof our operations by creating significant additional capacity .
In Australia , the Easy Price app received a major update , with all our national , local and Health Fund offers now built in , helping store teams to quickly identify the best value for every customer .
Optical coherence tomography ( OCT ) is a non-invasive imaging test , which uses light waves to take cross-section pictures of the retina and helps optometrists to diagnose and provide treatment guidance for conditions such as glaucoma and retinal disease . It is clearly the diagnostic future for optometrists as it offers significant benefits for patient care , provided that the right level of training and mentorship is in place . Over the past year , Specsavers has made significant progress in developing an OCT strategy for all our markets , and there are plans to commence an extensive roll-out across a number of them .
We completed our two-year construction project in Kidderminster , UK , and relocated Lens-Online and International Glazing Services into the purpose-built facility at the start of 2017 . This has provided both businesses with additional capacity and will allow them to support our next 10 years of anticipated growth . We now have the capacity to produce 95,000 lenses each week out of Kidderminster and 80,000 lenses out of our operation in Szatmar , Hungary , helping us to deliver great service and value to our customers .