Keeping the tills running, and the back office with them

Overview

New Ocean’s Supermarket is a busy independent grocery retailer serving its local community. In retail, technology failure is immediate and visible: when a till stops, a queue forms, and the cost is measured in customers who leave rather than in support tickets. YES Cyber AI was engaged to make the store’s technology dependable during trading hours, and to bring the same reliability to the back-office systems the business runs on.

The Client Challenge

Point-of-sale terminals, scales, payment devices, CCTV and the back-office network had been added over time by different suppliers, with no single view of any of it. When something failed there was no obvious owner, and diagnosing the cause could take longer than the fault itself. Behind the tills, stock and sales data lived in systems that did not talk to each other, so reconciliation was manual, slow and inevitably out of date by the time it was finished.

The Solution

We took ownership of the whole estate — front of house and back office — and rebuilt it around what a retail environment actually demands: resilience during trading hours, and data that reconciles itself.

• A full audit of point-of-sale, network, payment, CCTV and back-office systems, with a single documented view of the estate.
• A redesigned store network with resilient connectivity and segmented traffic, so a back-office issue cannot take the tills down.
• Proactive monitoring of the systems that matter during trading hours, with alerting before staff notice a problem.
• Endpoint and network security appropriate to a payment environment, including tightened access control.
• Automated, monitored backups of business and transaction data, with a tested recovery process.
• Integration between point-of-sale and back-office reporting, replacing manual reconciliation.
• On-site and remote support scheduled around trading hours rather than against them.

Why the Partnership Works

• A single partner covers point-of-sale, network, security and back office, so there is never a question of whose problem it is.
• Support is planned around trading hours, so maintenance never competes with customers.
• Monitoring is proactive, which means most issues are resolved before they reach the shop floor.
• Systems were integrated rather than replaced wholesale, protecting the investment already made.
• The relationship is ongoing, so the technology keeps pace as the business changes.