Blog: William McKnight

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POS and SAP acquires Triversity musings

Whither the POS system. Retail has a broad range of POS systems deployed. Check out the varied POS systems you encounter in the next month. It is a very difficult process, especially for a large retailer, to make changes to their POS environment. It requires field work and is very disruptive. New POS systems typically are phased in and seldom reach 100% deployment.

I have been following and evaluating Triversity for some time now for my retail clients. Asked about a hot pick in an interview a couple of months ago, I mentioned them. This week, they announced they were being acquired by SAP. Triversity alleviates some of the pain associated with the POS rollout as well as adding some modern CRM functionality that interface to a data warehouse (DW). This is a hot pick with growth potential for SAP.

Here are some examples of modern POS functionality around interface to the DW or the usage of DW information:

POS interfaces to the DW - during a transaction, the POS system will collect a customer ID, perhaps by scanning a magnetic card, or by the cashier entering the customer phone number. It will send this ID to the DW and receive back a message containing customer data. From this message, the POS will retrieve customer eligibility data, in the form of a list of target groups. It will relate these groups to its own offer/segment mapping file, thus determining which offers the customer is entitled to. It will execute these offers if their criteria are satisfied.

POS will retrieve any messages directed at the customer, and print them at the end of the receipt.

POS will retrieve any continuity offer totals currently active. If spend within the transaction should trigger a continuity offer, its award will be given.

At the end of the transaction, POS will send a message to the DW indicating any updates which may have occurred within the transaction. This would include transaction spend, any contribution to continuity totals, and notification of any continuity awards.

When this message is sent, POS must wait for a positive acknowledgement before sending the next message. This process is normally done by a background process on the POS controller, to avoid impact on the POS terminal itself.

The Offer Management System performs Offer, Promotion definition, and campaign definition. It feeds the DW with customer/target grouping data, and the POS system with offer definitions and target group offer mapping.

The POS stream will be monitored for customers responding to offers and response information will be held.

It will be possible to target offers to specific customer target customers or household groups (of any size) at the POS.

Of course, to enable much of this functionality, the retail organization will need to track their customers through a frequent shopper program. Our wallets will be filling with more and more of these cards as time goes on - in order to enable this kind of functionality for the retail organizations.

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