FoschiniData, a division of the Foschini Group that supplies IT services to the group's six trading divisions and over 1 500 stores, has deployed cellular backup communications from Metacom to 300 stores so far as part of its rollout of a new electronic payments platform.
“Integrating our payments platform means our customers get faster, more accurate service at the till, and we can reconcile transactions more quickly,” says Foschini Group IT Director Brent Curry. “It also means all our transactions are online - there's no offline state - so we need absolutely reliable, 100% available communications infrastructure.”
Senior IT Manager Clint Daries says the group needed a backup solution to its fixed-line infrastructure. “We looked at all the usual players in the market, but their solutions were too costly for our needs,” he says. “We needed a supplier flexible enough to design us a solution that met our technical requirements, while staying within a tight budget.”
Foschini's cellular communications service provider MTN-SP introduced Curry and Daries to Metacom, an electronics and software design company that specialises in secure machine-to-machine communication services.
“Metacom understood our needs and were able to leverage their relationship with MTN to design us a solution that was a good fit both technically and price-wise. We've rolled it out to 27 sites so far during the pilot phase, which, with up to 14 stores per site, makes for a total of over 300 stores.”
Metacom has supplied and installed devices in each store, which automatically switch communications from the primary fixed-line to the backup cellular network the moment there is a problem with the primary communications. “We had one site where the communications were affected by construction work, and the entire store ran all its communications, not just transactions, over the Metacom device for a week,” says Daries.
Staff in the stores need no extra knowledge or training, says Metacom MD R'ean van Niekerk. “Most of the time, staff won't even know that their communications have switched over to a backup network,” he says. “They may have to swipe a card twice if the primary network goes down in the middle of a transaction, but that's the extent of the disruption they will see.”
Daries says the Metacom solution is being rolled out in parallel with the new payments system. “Once we've converted a store to the new system, Metacom follows within a week; the process has been seamless so far.”
Metacom is also helping FoschiniData deliver GPRS communications to stores in Namibia. “They were able to use their existing relationship with Namibian service provider MTC to broker an agreement that can work for all of us,” says Daries. “Their flexibility and regional footprint is a real asset.”
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