Experience Makes for a Rapid Solution to Retailer’s POS Problems

xTEN helped with an urgent requirement to diagnose and resolve a service impacting issue with a national POS system.

The Challenge

Project Overview

There was an urgent requirement to diagnose and resolve a service impacting issue with a national POS system.
Every till in the country operated by this retailer was freezing causing them to lose sales.
This was a national problem impacting brand stores and concessions, thousands of tills across the country were out of commission.
The xTEN team approached the problem using our experience with high-impact, high-availability systems.
We applied a bespoke approach to quickly stabilise systems and resolve the issue.
Once the systems were made fully operational, we performed a full SQL Server health check and tuned the company’s systems to improve performance and prevent any more major outages.

The Customer

Internationally Renowned Retail Group

This international retailer commands a diverse portfolio of over 25 prestige brands sold in over 150 countries. They employ over 48k employees worldwide and operate their own branded stores as well as kiosks in department stores.

Transactions Had Ground to a Halt

This project was one of urgency; transactions instore had ground to a halt, the issue was causing the company to lose money and they needed a solution, now. Our goal was to work with the inhouse team to understand their experience and where our specialisms could plug the holes. We needed to quickly diagnose and resolve the issue.

Estate Monitoring and Visibility Are Everything

We started with monitoring. We used the monitoring data available to us and combined that with our years of experience to understand the full issue. There was no way an expensive, short-term fix would hold on this problem, we needed to deploy a robust, permanent solution. Falling back on best practices may work on a low transaction system, but can be impossible and impractical to implement them in a highly available, high transaction situation. The key is knowing the difference.

We put their entire estate under review to ensure all systems were operating at peak performance.

The final piece of the puzzle was to train the inhouse team on how to get the most of their existing monitoring to spot potential problems before they become service-impacting. This left the team confident and prepared for any future issues.

Crisis Averted, Plan for Future Stability in Place

The immediate crisis was resolved, and a plan was put in place to maintain future stability. xTEN gave the in-house IT team the tools they needed to maintain the system along with a detailed review of the issues and steps for remediation.

The national POS outage was resolved, and trading resumed in all stores across the country. Our solution saw the retailer’s systems working more efficiently than ever before, giving the company even more potential for growth.