Industry: Clothing, footwear, textiles, home-ware and cellular retailer
Requirements: Transaction processing facilities for a new store without telephone service
Solution: CellPAD by Datalinx Technologies Pty Ltd
Background
PEP stores is southern Africa`s leading retailer of clothing, footwear, textiles, home-ware and cellular products, with over 1 100 stores across the subcontinent - including many in small towns and rural areas not served by other retailers. Since its formation 40 years ago, the firm has concentrated on offering value-for-money products to lower to middle market consumers; it has a low-cost culture and keeps its margins to the minimum.
PEP has historically operated on a cash-only basis to keep its costs low, but recently card transactions have become important as stores open in shopping centres to serve a slightly wealthier clientele, and as traditional customers make increasing use of buy-aid services.
Requirements
Early in 2005 PEP opened its fifth store in Mafikeng, the capital of SA`s North West Province. Located in a semi-arid region 300km west of Johannesburg, Mafikeng has a population of just over 250 000, with most of those people living a semi-rural lifestyle in areas that were previously part of the Bophuthatswana "homeland". Per capita incomes are low, but the town`s economy is growing rapidly.
PEP`s new store was opened to serve this growing market. With buy-aid card transactions an increasingly important part of PEP`s business, it was essential to have communications infrastructure in place when the store opened -- but it was located in a newly-developed precinct that did not yet have landline telephone service, and no radio signal was available for the wireless solution offered by Telkom.
Solution
"We had to get our business set up to take people`s cards in a hurry," says PEP`s Neil Thompson; "but there was a long waiting list for landlines. We spoke to our sister company Ackermans, who told us they were very happy with the CellPAD solution they`d just installed for their stores."
Thompson contacted Datalinx, which was able to deliver a working CellPAD installation to the new Mafikeng store within a week. "They did a test in one of our Cape Town stores, then flew up to Mafikeng to do the installation. It was very short notice and they didn`t know our business, so I was impressed with how fast they were able to get things up and running," he says.
CellPAD`s integration with the national cellular GPRS network made it the only possible solution, he adds. "There was no other way we could get transaction processing capacity in that store. It was a fast, effective solution that got the job done."
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