AFGRI goes live without Telkom lines

They say a "Boer maak ‘n plan" and this is the perfect example.  When the phone lines aren’t there it doesn’t mean the earth has to stop turning and you can’t open your retail store. It just means you have to have a little ingenuity.  This is the story of how one of SA’s largest co-ops and an IT company from Centurion did just that.

AFGRI Farmcity has recently opened the doors to their largest Farmcity Agricultural retail outlet. The store is located in Ruimsig and is 4500m₂. It offers a fresh and exciting store format, competitive pricing and unique product offerings, excellent customer service and technical advice. The first Farmcity store was opened in Pretoria in June 2003.

 “In the opening of a retail store, one would typically rely heavily on the communication infrastructure such as landlines and data connectivity,” says Gustav Piater, QBCon's Marketing Director. “In spite of early planning and scheduled deadlines, the local tele-coms infrastructure provider was not able to meet the deadlines that the task team for Ruimsig Farmcity had set in place and failed to deliver on time.”

“Due to a heavy marketing campaign, Farmcity had no other option but to open their doors on the planned date to the public. They had to rely on alternative interim solutions from cellular service providers for data connectivity and made use of QBCon’s off-line application functionality to be able to facilitate trading”.  AFGRI utilises the QBFin retail application for its (Retail) Producer Services business (including Farmcity), and the launch was made possible without the luxury of coms by deploying the “off-line” POS solution from QBCon.

The offline POS component of the application allows the end user to have a near-online front-end in the retail environment. This means that although data connectivity may not be available, the normal functionality of trading (selling at the right price, returning of goods) is available. In the unlikely scenario where connectivity is not available, sales can still be done on the POS, and all sales information from the POS is buffered. This will be updated (replicated) dynamically to the central server when connectivity is re-established. The same process is done for changes that get done on the central server, awaiting replication to each of the POS’s. When connectivity is available, the background replication process will update both the POS’s, as well as the back office bi-directionally.

QBFin Retail application for Co-operatives is an integrated retail management system, which allows the end user to operationally run the business, including the store and back office (head office), i.e. have POS for cash and account sales, stock control to order and replenish stock levels and totally integrated financials to facilitate credited payments, debtor receipts and all banking activities, and have all this information on-demand available.

“We requested QBCon to implement their offline version of the POS, as we were not prepared to open the store without offline trading capabilities.  Currently we have many stores using the Host Based POS system and whenever there is a power failure or the landlines are out of order, we don’t have a back-up system and we end up having to manually write up every transaction which will then have to be re-captured on the system when we are back online. It’s a laborious process”, says Patrick Nelissen, AFGRI Provincial Manager for Gauteng. “For our smaller branches it is fine, but with the Farmcity Concept and especially the Ruimsig branch now opening, where huge transaction quantities occur, this becomes a major issue”.

For the first two days of trade at Ruimsig, AFGRI battled with network connections. “We tried three mobile service providers, as well as the local telecoms infrastructure provider, and not even the wireless network providers proved to be the answer”. “This exercise proved more frustrating as the networks were continually disconnecting and re-connecting. Just when you start with a transaction, the network would go down, and when it reconnects you have to re-capture the transaction”, remarked Nelissen.

QBCon were commissioned to customise their current stand-alone POS solution to address the specific requirements for Farmcity. The systems were tested at the existing Farmcity stores before being implemented at Ruimsig. “We had planned to open on April 21st 2007, and three days before the opening, we saw that the landlines had not been installed. We had actually only planned for 4 stand-alone POS units to be placed in the store, but we ended up deploying 8 of QBCon’s units. Thank GOD we did this because otherwise it would have been a disaster!” remarks Nelissen. “Basically, QBCon got the off-line till units to start working and they are still working. Until recently, we still did not have any landlines installed.”

Of QBCon’s service, Nelissen said, “The guys worked hard, they were there the whole time. They are always there to support us. If we asked for changes, they made them. Gustav also spent a lot of time on site; I think he was just as worried as all of us. He was very concerned, but came through with the necessary solutions”.

When all the dust settled the phone lines were still silent, but at least the tills were ringing thanks to the plan "wat die Boer gemaak het."