Eyeway × Nordic Vision Retail
A phased proposal: from product data to a modern PMS in three stages.
We propose a three-stage program in which each stage is independently valuable and each is contracted only when the previous stage has proved itself. Risk is added one dimension at a time — never two at once.
The challenge, as we understand it
NVR is asking the market a hard question: how do you modernize 330 independent stores across four countries — each with its own owner, its own PMS and its own customer relationship — without either forcing a high-risk single-vendor swap, or accepting a status quo of fragmented, manual, country-specific systems that no longer keep pace with chains.
One of the strategic questions in the RFI asks whether "the third way" — an open platform architecture with a shared data backbone and surrounding pieces evolving independently — could be the right path for parts of the business. This proposal is our answer: yes, it is, and the phased model below is how to deliver it.
Three stages, one principle
A program where each stage adds exactly one dimension of risk — never two at once.
This structure is intentional. At every step:
- Members receive measurable value before the next stage begins.
- The harder regulatory and migration questions are addressed only after lower-risk stages have built mutual confidence.
- No member is ever asked to make a system change before the previous stage has paid for itself.
This is the answer to your members' fear of a high-risk single-vendor swap — and to your association's need for a credible plan that can be both promised and delivered.
PMS basics work today. Deliver new value first — then migrate to a unified Eyeway platform on the timeline quality demands.
Our market scan across the five dominant PMS systems found the operational basics workable. The acute pain in your workshops is not a broken PMS — it is the missing value-adding capabilities around it.
So we add new value first — data infrastructure that removes manual work, and customer-facing capabilities no incumbent offers — integrated with the existing PMS. Network-wide impact in months, not years.
A unified Eyeway platform is the destination. Decades of comparable work tell us a certified, multi-country PMS takes longer than the RFI's 2027 pilot assumes. Phased is honest — not delayed.
Stage 1 — Eyeway Hub: value across the network in months
Stage 1 fully resolves five of the eighteen workshop pain points named in §4 of NVR's Requirements Specification (~28 %) and handles the most acute regulatory deadline — UDI for contact lenses, 9 November 2026.
What members get
A centralized product, pricing and inventory data layer for all 330 stores — plus the focused in-store tools that turn that data into operational value. Wholesaler catalogs and price lists are ingested centrally, normalized, and replicated into each store's existing PMS with the store's own pricing rules applied. UDI registration for contact lenses is built in — ahead of the November 2026 deadline.
On top of the data layer, Stage 1 includes:
- A stocktake scanning app that turns manual stocktake into a scan-and-go workflow, reusing the UDI scanner infrastructure.
- A filter-based lens selection interface that lets store staff find lenses by criteria — type, index, coating, supplier — instead of scrolling through long article lists, with retail prices visible in the same view.
- Real-time inventory feeds from lens suppliers, integrated alongside their price lists, so the lens selector shows what is actually available now.
- A network-wide reporting layer available only to NVR — the first chain-level view of assortment, turnover, pricing patterns and wholesaler volumes across all 330 stores.
What this solves immediately
- The 3–5 workdays per month each store currently spends on product data entry — gone.
- Lens price-list updates — automated, with each store's own markup rules.
- UDI readiness — handled centrally, not store by store.
- Manual stocktake — replaced with a scan-and-go workflow.
- Lens ordering from long scrollable lists — replaced with filter-based selection that shows price and live supplier inventory in the same view.
- Margin leakage from stale and inconsistent pricing — visible and correctable.
- Consolidated reporting across all 330 stores — available to NVR for the first time.
Value to each member
Validated against a real Finnish store's inventory data (April 2026):
Commercial structure
Per-store monthly fee, contracted centrally by NVR for the entire 330-store network — one contract, one network price, no per-store negotiations. Target pricing: €100–120 per store per month. Total network investment: approximately €400,000–475,000 per year, against aggregate member value in the range of €20 million per year.
Timeline
- Q3 2026 — Contract signed; implementation begins the same quarter, with Digital store design starting in parallel.
- Q1 2027 — Hub live in the first stores (Finland and one additional country).
- Q3 2027 — Hub live across all 330 stores in all four countries.
Members see Hub working inside their existing PMS within months, not years.
Network intelligence: NVR sees its network for the first time
The current gap. Today NVR represents 330 independent stores but has no day-to-day visibility into what they actually do — what they carry, what turns, what sits in stock, what they pay wholesalers. Your members' own workshops flagged this as one of the most acute friction points: there is no chain-level view of the network at all.
Hub closes the gap as a byproduct of its core work. Because every store on Hub feeds and reads the same normalized product, pricing and inventory data, the network-level aggregate view is created automatically — no extra effort from members, no questionnaires, no manual reporting.
What NVR can see across the network:
- Inventory health — working capital tied up in stock over 18 months old, by country and brand.
- Assortment coverage — which brands and collections are carried by what share of the network.
- Network turnover — turnover rate per brand and category, by country.
- Pricing patterns — anonymized markup distributions per brand; where prices have drifted stale.
- Wholesaler volumes — aggregate annual volume and margin per wholesaler across 330 stores.
- New-collection adoption — how fast a collection moves from launch to shelf network-wide.
- UDI compliance status — network-wide compliance and audit-readiness dashboard.
How this changes NVR's position. For the first time, NVR can put a specific number on the table in supplier negotiations: "your brand accounts for X % of shelf space and €Y million in annual purchase volume across 330 stores." That number is the basis for better terms, exclusivity arrangements and earlier access to new collections.
Privacy by design. Member-level data stays with the member. NVR's view is aggregated and anonymized — never per-store identifiable without explicit consent. Customer and patient data is not in scope at Stage 1.
UDI compliance for contact lenses — solved across the network before the deadline
What the regulation requires. Under the EU Medical Device Regulation, every contact lens dispensed by your member stores must, from 9 November 2026, carry and be traceable by a Unique Device Identifier: a GS1 GTIN combined with batch number and expiry date, encoded in a GS1 DataMatrix on the packaging.
Why this is acute. The deadline is months away. Few independent stores have UDI workflows in place today. Solving it store-by-store would require each member to maintain a GS1 catalog source, deploy scanning, configure their PMS to record batch and expiry per dispense, and keep an audit record for at least ten years. For most members this is not a realistic project to complete alone.
How Hub solves it for the whole network at once:
- A central GS1 registry — full identifier set for every contact-lens SKU your members carry, normalized across all wholesalers.
- DataMatrix code handling — Hub produces and validates the 2D barcodes for in-store labeling and scanning.
- Scan-on-receipt and scan-on-dispense — a lightweight scanning interface (web and mobile), no PMS change required.
- Audit-ready record — Hub maintains the regulator-ready log, retained for the full MDR-mandated period.
- PMS replication — UDI fields flow into each store's existing PMS through the same replication robot.
Why Q3 2026 contracting matters specifically here. The November deadline cannot be moved. A contract signed in Q3 2026 leaves roughly four months of implementation runway before the deadline — enough for the central registry, the scanning interface and per-store onboarding to be in place network-wide. A later contract turns 9 November 2026 from a managed milestone into a per-store scramble that the network cannot win store by store.
PMS integration — how the replication robot reaches every system, regardless of vintage
For Hub to deliver on its promise, normalized product, pricing, UDI and inventory data must reach the store's existing PMS — whether that PMS has a modern API, a local SQL database, or only a keyboard-and-screen user interface. NVR's current four-country landscape contains all three.
The replication robot is not a single integration. It is a per-PMS adapter — five adapters to cover the entire network — and each adapter uses whichever of three integration modes the underlying PMS allows.
Where the PMS exposes a documented database schema, the adapter reads and writes directly to that schema.
Where the PMS exposes a modern API, the adapter calls those endpoints. Easiest to evolve as the PMS evolves.
Where neither a documented database nor a usable API exists, the adapter drives the PMS through its own user interface, exactly as a human would.
This three-mode fallback is the reason Hub's full-network rollout by Q3 2027 does not depend on any single PMS vendor modernizing on our schedule. Each adapter is hardened against schema or UI changes through automated regression testing on a reference installation, so vendor updates do not silently break replication.
Stage 2 — Digital store: each member as a modern online channel — browse the inventory, book the visit
Stage 2 fully resolves two further workshop pain points (~11 %), both in the Booking and customer interaction category, and opens a customer-facing channel — a live inventory storefront paired with a modern online booking experience — that no incumbent PMS vendor offers.
What members get
A single customer-facing channel for each member store, built directly on Hub's normalized product, inventory and calendar data and branded for each store. It combines two capabilities that today's customers expect together but no incumbent provides:
- A live inventory storefront. Customers browse the frames physically available at their local member store — what is on the shelf in their style, their size, their budget — not a generic catalog with no idea what is actually in stock.
- A modern online booking experience. Real availability with a ≥7-week horizon, mobile-first flow, rebooking and cancellation without phoning the store, automated reminders. The expectation any patient under fifty already has from every other service they book.
The two capabilities come together in a single flow: pick a frame, book a fitting time, walk in. The portal works alongside the store's existing PMS calendar — first as a parallel calendar, then with full two-way synchronization once each integration is in place.
Why this matters for your members
Today every member store carries tens of thousands of euros in frame inventory that customers cannot see until they walk in the door — and the only way to book a visit is to call during business hours. Independent stores compete with chains that have invested heavily in both, and lose ground every year because the local assortment is invisible online and the booking experience is two decades behind.
- Inventory becomes a storefront. The working capital tied in frames starts driving discovery — customers find them online and walk in already interested in something specific.
- Booking matches modern expectations. The "customers call instead of booking online" and "booking horizon too short" pains documented in your workshops are both solved by the same flow — modern UX, real availability, ≥7-week horizon from the outset.
- Patients arrive pre-qualified. Fewer browse-only visits, more booked fittings, less time per customer when they are in the chair.
- Every member gets a network-scale digital channel. None of them has to build it alone — and none of them ends up with a half-built site that no one keeps current.
- The customer relationship stays local. Each store keeps its own brand, its own bookings, its own patients. The Digital store is a window into each member, not a marketplace that abstracts them away.
Why this is differentiating
No existing PMS vendor in the optical market offers a customer-facing channel that is both a live inventory storefront and a modern booking interface, built on a shared normalized catalog. The closest equivalents are static brand sites that have no idea what is on the shelf today and bolt-on booking widgets that do not see real availability. Members get the digital presence of a chain without surrendering anything that makes them independent.
Commercial structure
A separate per-store add-on to the Stage 1 Hub contract — opted into at the network level when Stage 1 has proved itself in production. Pricing to be set against demonstrated Stage 1 value.
Timeline
- Q3 2027 — Digital store MVP launches in Finland with a parallel calendar, while Hub network rollout completes across the remaining countries.
- Q1 2028 — Digital store live across all four countries with full PMS calendar integration.
Stage 3 — A modern PMS: Finland first, then country by country
Stage 3 fully resolves the remaining eleven workshop pain points (~61 %), covering clinical documentation, inventory, POS, finance, CRM and lens ordering. After Stage 3, all eighteen workshop frictions are fully resolved.
What members get
A modern, certified Practice Management System covering clinical record, POS, inventory and reporting — built on the same Hub data backbone members already use. Members are not required to migrate; the PMS is opt-in per store, country by country, on the store's own schedule.
Why Finland first
Two reasons aligned:
- By your own analysis, Finland's current PMS landscape is in the weakest position of the four markets — the need for improvement is most acute there.
- Our team's deepest regulatory familiarity is with Finnish requirements (Kanta, Suomi.fi, Kela), which allows us to absorb the first-country certification burden with the lowest unknown risk.
The opt-in principle
Your members own their stores and their customer relationships. We propose a model that respects that completely: NVR commits to making the PMS available; members choose whether and when to adopt it. The network gains a common platform organically as members migrate at their own pace — without a top-down mandate that would be both politically and operationally heavy.
Per-country scope
Each country gets its own certified deployment: Kanta and Suomi.fi in Finland; certified POS, BankID and SIE4 in Sweden; HELFO and BankID in Norway; MitID and SAF-T in Denmark; e-prescription integrations and local accounting standards in each. Each country is its own delivery; no country waits for another to finish.
Timeline
- Q3 2027 — PMS development and Finnish certifications (Kanta, certified POS, Suomi.fi) begin in parallel with the Digital store launch.
- Q2 2028 — PMS pilot in Finland (5–10 stores).
- Q4 2028 — PMS Finland rollout to opted-in stores; PMS pilots begin in Sweden, Norway and Denmark.
- Q2 2029 — PMS Sweden, Norway and Denmark rollouts begin.
- Q3 2029 — PMS fully complete and available across all four countries.
This is an ambitious timeline. We commit to it because per-country certification and engineering work runs in parallel — not sequentially — from 2027 onwards, and because Stages 1 and 2 have by then established the data backbone and customer-facing layer that the PMS simply ties together.
Roadmap at a glance
Three years from contract to a fully modernized, network-wide platform — with measurable member value at every stage in between.
- Q3 26 Contract signed; Hub implementation begins; Digital store design starts in parallel
- Q1 27 Hub live in first stores (Finland + one country)
- Q3 27 Hub live across all 330 stores; Digital store MVP launches in Finland; PMS development + Finnish certifications begin
- Q1 28 Digital store live in all four countries with full PMS calendar integration
- Q2 28 PMS pilot in Finland (5–10 stores)
- Q4 28 PMS Finland rollout; pilots begin in Sweden, Norway and Denmark
- Q2 29 PMS Sweden, Norway and Denmark rollouts begin
- Q3 29 PMS fully complete in all four countries
Coverage of NVR's named pain points
This section maps each of the eighteen workshop pain points identified in §4 of NVR's Requirements Specification to the stage in which it is fully resolved.
Methodology. "Fully resolved" means the pain point is removed by the deliverables of the stage in question, without depending on a later stage. Pain points that are only partially addressed by a stage are not counted as resolved there; they appear later, in the stage that completes the resolution.
What is not in this table
- Regulatory pain points (UDI, EHDS, NIS2) listed in §6 of the Requirements Specification are not workshop frictions and are tracked separately. UDI for contact lenses is fully resolved in Stage 1 — see the Spotlight in §03.
- Other RFI-articulated needs — the twelve core operational areas in §5 of the Requirements Specification, and the 254 Must-rated entries in the Requirements Matrix — are addressed in our matrix response rather than in this proposal-level summary.
- Operational frictions named in our own analysis but not in NVR's workshops (manual product data entry, stale retail pricing, inactive SKU hygiene) are also outside this table; they are described in §03 and in the value tables.
What protects your network
The phased structure is designed so that risk to NVR and to your members never compounds.
If Stage 1 does not deliver the value promised, Stage 2 is not contracted. The network is not exposed to a multi-year program with deferred value.
Hub runs alongside existing PMS systems. The Digital store works alongside existing calendars. Even Stage 3 — the actual PMS — is opt-in per store.
Each country's PMS rollout is its own delivery. If certification in one country runs into delay, the others continue.
Stores keep their pricing decisions, their patient relationships and their brand. The data backbone is shared; the customer-facing parts remain each member's own.
Hub adds to the existing PMS without altering it. The Digital store adds a new channel without replacing existing ones. If the program were to end after Stage 1 or Stage 2, members would lose nothing they currently have.
What this proposal does not promise
We have been deliberate about what is in scope at each stage so that the commitments we make are ones we can keep.
- Stage 1 does not include clinical records, POS, or appointment booking. It is a product, pricing and UDI data layer. Anything beyond that belongs to Stages 2 and 3.
- Stage 2 does not replace the store's existing PMS calendar. It adds a customer-facing channel and integrates with the calendar; the existing PMS remains the operational source of truth until Stage 3.
- Stage 3 is opt-in. We do not promise that every store will migrate. We promise that every store will have the option, on its own timeline.
- We do not promise an EHDS-grade clinical record before Q4 2028 in Finland, or before Q3 2029 in the other three countries. Stage 3 delivers it on that schedule — not earlier.
- We do not promise capabilities that depend on a 330-store reference base or a 40-person multilingual support organization being already in place today. We propose to earn those during Stages 1 and 2, with NVR's network as the proving ground.
See it working
Each stage has a prototype that illustrates the kind of value it would deliver.
These are preliminary drafts, not final designs — they exist to make the proposal concrete, not to lock in product decisions.
A store dashboard that turns inventory data into concrete next actions, plus NVR's network-level view aggregating those signals across all member stores.
A customer-facing channel combining a live inventory storefront with a modern online booking experience.
A full Practice Management System frontend — customers, consultations, catalog, billing, reports — in a single modern shell.