17 June 2020
Upgrading EPOS solutions can often be a testing time, but necessary for any retail or hospitality business that looks to benefit from advances in technology and strides to enhance customer experience.
The effectiveness of planning for success was recently demonstrated across 259 Costa Coffee stores by EPOS solutions company WRS Systems, working closely with delivery partner Celestra.
The requirement from Costa was to undertake the upgrade of existing terminals to new Oxhoo Indigo units running software from Datasym UK. Importantly all new terminals had to be implemented and old terminals decommissioned without any disruption to trading.
Added to this, the whole project had to be completed within a reduced timeframe, at some of Costa’s busiest stores and in the run-up to the important festive trading period.
The outcome was summed up by Phil Scully, Group CIO at Costa who commented: “Great job, thank you so much to everyone involved. Great team effort in a short timescale and very well executed. This will make a massive difference to our stores.”
WRS Systems is recognised as the sole EPOS provider to Costa Coffee, supporting over 4,000 terminals across the Costa estate.
The project was led by WRS Systems IT director Chris Jackson and Richard Hawkins, implementation manager with support from WRS Systems operations and logistics teams.
The approach adopted by WRS Systems pre-planned all stages, including equipment testing and ‘hot staging’ at the companies dedicated facilities on the Isle of Wight.
This enabled systems imaging and advanced system set-up, including store specific configuration to be completed prior to equipment being delivered to the 259 stores covered under the upgrade programme.
Importantly, the team from WRS Systems worked closely and in full collaboration with Costa and Celestra throughout the project and supported installation in the field remotely, through their professional technical and support service teams.
This approach ensured the delivery teams from Celestra and WRS Systems could complete installation of each new terminal at each store in as little as 5-minutes.
