Point of Sale Refresh Project

Shing Digital’s Client (a large retailer) had launched a bid to purchase their largest competitor in their retail space. Upon shareholder approval from their competitor, the Client wanted to unify the Point of Sale (POS) and back office systems with that of their competitors in order to streamline the businesses operations. Shing Digital was given a week to create a project plan and co-ordinate those plans with the POS provider. Upon approval of the bid to purchase the competitor, Shing Digital was given a week to put together a team, provide training, setup the staging facilities, and procure equipment. The request from the CEO was to have the project completed in a 21-day timeframe starting from the initial deployment – we fulfilled this request.

The project consisted of 83 locations throughout Alberta and BC with 300 PCs, 83 servers, 83 firewalls, and 83 switches. All servers, firewalls, and switches were new; however, only 25% of the PCs were new. The old PCs that were removed from the locations had to be sent back to the staging facility to be re-imaged and sent back out.

In order to achieve this IMAC project on such a tight schedule, with challenging logistics across many locations in small communities across two provinces, the project execution was of upmost importance. Shing Digital constructed a four-person onsite deployment team that worked overnight and utilized support from our service desk. Additionally, a ten-person staging/logistics team as well as a dedicated service desk team was used to support the locations and operations teams the morning after the deployment.

The initial plan consisted of transitioning four retail locations per night with one deployment tech per location. Our team would arrive first and transition the hardware followed by the POS team that would transition the data from each site; this occurred in an overnight 10-hour timeframe. Our experienced service desk teams were able to resolve of each of the issues that the deployment teams encountered. Because of the expedient nature of our work, the client requested the project move at a slower pace – the deployment was reduced to three locations per day. Shing Digital completed the entire project in 30 days from the first day of deployment.