Driving a Mission-Critical Deployment for a 7,500-Store Retailer
Trexin helped a $2B international retailer integrate and release a new point-of-sale system to over 7,500 stores throughout North America.
Business Driver
A prolonged decline in sales at a $2B international retailer that led to the replacement of its CEO focused the executive team’s attention on the root causes of deteriorating performance and financial results. Two leading indicators (employee retention and customer satisfaction) were significantly down and believed to be negatively impacted by outdated technology, including five different point-of-sale (POS) systems in the field. These legacy platforms did not easily accommodate new retention programs and modern customer contact channels leveraging mobile and social technologies, which was causing increased employee attrition and loss of sales to competitors who had already made investments in these disruptive innovations. Therefore, our Client decided to install a new POS, and the Chief Information Officer asked Trexin to provide executional leadership, development oversight, and process engineering to ensure the successful integration and rollout of the POS to over 7,500 stores in 3 countries.
Approach
Given the extensive scope and an aggressive implementation timeline, Trexin’s approach was based on the following keys to success:
- Close cooperation with the IT leadership team, affording streamlined decision-making and expedient changes to tactics as issues arose
- Strict adherence to strategic business goals with limited tolerance for non-core feature enhancement
- Embedded, bottom-up approach of working directly with the POS vendor, influencing their technology and architecture decisions as well as their software development and deployment methodology
- A parallel-workstream strategy that enabled software releases on a weekly basis while stores were simultaneously being deployed, reaching levels of more than 200 stores/day
Results
The new POS was successfully integrated with our Client’s back-office systems through 86 custom interfaces and deployed to over 7,000 stores within 9 months, with the remaining 500 stores deployed to Canada and Puerto Rico after extensions were made for foreign languages and alternative currencies. Employees praised the system for its ease of use and efficient workflow, and our Client is now proceeding with further investments that advance the goal of improving the employee retention and customer satisfaction KPIs.
Tagged in:
Optimized Operations, Other Industries, Program Execution, Retail
