Vendor Management Improves Business Operations

Two years ago we stepped in as our client’s IT department and committed to providing end user support.  At the time, our client had 101 locations and around 360 employees all over the Midwest.  We mapped out the vendor responsibilities working directly with each vendor.  Using this map we implemented a triage system between our client, their vendors, and us.  We enabled our client’s employees, whether working in the store or in corporate, to simply contact when problems emerge.  For example, if our client had a problem with NetSuite, an ERP/CRM cloud application, he/she would call and send a ticket to us.  We would open a ticket with NetSuite support.  This triage system allows us to figure out exactly what the problem is within a short period of time and open the ticket with the right entity because we know all the interrelationships between the vendors and the infrastructure.  The main advantage of our Managed Services offering is more holistic view of what is happening with IT operations, thereby allowing problems solved in a timely manner.  Another benefit is that by having us work with IT departments of our client’s vendors, problems can be solved quicker allowing the IT team to focus on revenue generating strategic initiatives.

One example of how our services improve our client’s business is by managing their Point of Sale (POS) system.  Considering that this particular client is a retailer, it is of essential to be able to process sales transactions timely and accurately.  At the time we started working with our client, their POS system was around ten years old, and had outdated architecture.  We realized that the databases on each location were growing too large and failing.  Typically what would have happened in the past is that their IT staff would just keep fixing the problems in a reactive way, a short-term solution that does not address the root cause of the problems.  During times when transaction would fail, credit card transactions had to be written on a piece of paper and processed manually.  Once the transaction system recovered, the stores would call in to process the transaction, sometimes much later after the transaction had actually occurred.  This problem was compounded by the fact that 75 percent of the stores were having frequent outages.  Their POS was off once, twice, and sometimes even three times a month for up to a day, and sometimes even more than once a day.  When our team stepped in, we continued to perform the same patches and fixes, but we also started looking into a more long-term solution because these failures were not acceptable for the success of our clients business.  We sat down and looked at some low cost simple solutions that we could implement to help solve these problems. Within three weeks, we had solved nearly all of the transaction problems by revamping their data warehousing process.  There is still an occasional issue here and there which is to be expected in a complex environment, but outages decreased from 75 percent of stores once to three times a month to maybe one to two stores a quarter. It has drastically improved their operations and their ability to conduct business.

Working Together in Real Time

Client Overview

Our client is a franchise organization that has maintained its commitment to product quality even with spectacular growth.  This commitment to their product has enabled the company to expand to over 100 locations all over the U.S.  Our client provides to its franchisees a large support staff in the areas of finance, marketing, business consulting, training and product development.  Communication among franchisees is one of the key factors to our client success.

Business Challenges

One of the challenges our client faced was a lack of visibility to into sales across it's network of franchisees.  Gathering this information was a time intensive process and not in real time.  Having visibility in real-time gives them a better grasp on the effectiveness of marketing initiatives.  Another challenge our client faced was the lack of vendor responsiveness on issues related to their current point of sale (POS) system.  Many support request were going unanswered or unresolved.   It was time for a change.

Agosto’s Solution

Our goal was to help our client make the best decision possible and work within the budget that they had allocated.  Upgrading the point-of-sale (POS) system so headquarters would have visibility into the franchise network will lay the foundation for further growth.  Having an enterprise POS system not only allows for better information flow between corp. and franchisees, but it will provide a more stable, standardized, and centralized environment.  This upgrade will also allow for timely and accurate sales tracking where our client can easily identify inventory levels and buyer behavior in real time.  For example, our client's requirements were to be able to see if an increase in sales of certain new product has been affected by a marketing campaign.  Using this new system our client is able to connect marketing dollars spend with the actual sales.

To overcome our client’s challenges with their current system our team created Request for Proposal (RFP) which was then submitted to fifteen POS vendors.  The evaluation of the vendors was based on four criteria: affordability, our client’s requirements, loyalty and gift card integration, and Payment Card Industry (PCI) compliance.  Currently, we are choosing between two potential vendors.

In order to help our client make a good decision, we implemented a feature analysis platform.  We brought our SaaS expertise to the table and implemented a Quality assurance tool called Run Test Run that lives in the cloud.  This is a quality assurance testing tool which enabled individual employees to test their respective departments, i.e. marketing can test marketing features, operations can test operations features, etc.

At this point we will be completing our testing and moving into the deployment phase.  More on this later.