How large Belorussian retailer broke vendor lock and installed 300 self-service checkouts before New Year’s peak of sales
- Customer
- Gippo | BelMarket
- Project manager on the customer side
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- IT Provider
- CSI
- Year of project completion
- 2024
- Project timeline
- June, 2022 - April, 2024
- Project scope
- 1500 automated workstations
- Goals
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Final goal of this project was to install self-checkouts (SCO) at every shop within retail networks GIPPO (gippo.by) and BELMARKET. The main reason for this installation was a staff shortage situation. Retailer needed to achieve his business goal of revenue at New Year sales peak, even in case of strong linear employees’ deficit.
Ex-partner who supplied GIPPO’s cash register system and loyalty system couldn’t satisfy GIPPO’s request for scaling SCO and ex-partner made a strong vendor lock for his systems. This lock became a reason why GIPPO and BELMARKET couldn’t increase the quantity of SCO in their shops. This was a problem to be solved.
- Project Results
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● The company eliminated the vendor lock and now stands on the open path of developing POS and loyalty systems;● The installation of 290 SCOs was finished successfully even in remote regions of the country;● SCO decreased the volume of work for the staff. The share of SCO operations is growing every day;● By using this technology retailer didn’t have loss of revenue during New Year’s sales, despite having only 15% of needed employees in shops that time;● Market competitors in Belorussian retail are trying to copy some of Gippo’s developed solutions nowadays. This says a lot;● New cashiers’ software Set Retail has made some important changes to be implemented. For example: Gippo switched to software fiscalizer (ikassa) instead of hardware fiscalizer. Gippo started to reduce paper checks printing. Etc;● During this project other goals were achieved as well. For example, the company synchronized products directory of both retails (Gippo & BelMarket); has developed its own cashiers tab solution, developed its own buyer’s display solution and so on.● New platform Set Loyalty gives possibility to implement all necessary loyalty mechanics and develop loyalty program for customers;«We have greatly enriched the corporate data warehouse with quality data thanks to the ESB data bus. And now we are ML | AI ready company».
The uniqueness of the project
It was a huge project which actually combined 6 subprojects:
1. Change of the cash-register system,
2. Change of the loyalty system;
3. Installation of new POS software all over the 120 shops;
4. Installation of more than 200 additional SCO devices;
5. Implementation of software fiscalizer;
6. Implementation of Data bus.
Previous retailer’s partner didn’t support this difference and tried to stop it at every opportunity. But the retailer changed the partner and finished the process successfully without any service failures. All stores were running smoothly.
Transformation schema was developed, which ensured a smooth transition and minimized the risk of ex-partner’s intervention.
During this project several new effective solutions were also developed and implemented: cashiers tabs, buyer’s monitors etc.
- Used software
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POS system - Set Retail;Loyalty system - Set Loyalty;SCO devices - CSI K;Data Bus - Set ESB;Cashiers tabs – Itirs Tabs.
- Difficulty of implementation
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- This project was very ambitious and needed high quality both strategic and situational management.
- Time to time the quantity of service incidents increased 3 or 4 times during the project, but now this quantity is 3-4 times less.
- The main difficulty and challenge — there was no time to delay. The problems had to be solved right here and right now.
- Project Description
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The company operates two retail networks: Gippo (hypermarkets) and BelMarket (supermarkets), 120 shops in total. The company is ranked 5th in the retail market in the country.The story of the project began in 2018 when GIPPO installed the first 8 SCO in Belarus. Even at that time there were problems to start the first SCO with an ex-supplier, so the new partner (CSI company) helped to achieve this goal. But the price for this was a vendor lock from the previous partner: GIPPO couldn’t put SCOs further - to Belmarket, it’s the second retail network.There is a huge demographic gap in Belarus as in Russia nowadays and there is a strong unsatisfied need of personnel. That’s why GIPPO decided to change all together despite all the complexity, risks and costs.All retail companies have a massive revenue during the New Year’s sales peak, the biggest for the whole year.
And the show had begun:- 2022, Spring. Negotiations with the CSI-team about the possibility of this project. Preliminary contract as a result.
- 2023, May. The installation of new SCOs (model CSI K) at stores began. It went till November 2023. It was necessary to change all POS-systems, to change cashiers’ software, to change communications with other information systems like ERP and BI very fast, and to finish it all till New Year’s peak. «And we’ve made it! Nowadays I can’t believe this!»
- The final step was about the loyalty system. Up to the spring 2024 both systems were operating: new CDP-platform Set Loyalty and the previous system. The legacy system was finally switched off in April 2024 after switching connections between e-commerce and loyalty
- Project geography
- Republic of Belarus
- Additional presentations:
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