Getting Cegid Retail Y2 Ready to Trade After Lockdown

24 Mar 2021

With retail stores scheduled to open in England and Wales on April 12, and in Scotland on April 26, now is the time to ensure that your Cegid Retail Y2 POS estate is ready to trade.

As a modern POS system, Cegid Retail Y2 is straightforward to re-start, but it is still important to make some checks now to ensure that there are no surprises and to avoid system disruption when stores re-open. All of the checks discussed below are relevant for on-premise installations. For Cegid Retail Y2 SAAS clients, the server-related checks will be performed by Cegid.

MWC Partners recommend:

Restart all Cegid Retail servers, whether the database, application, report/task and load balancing servers are run as virtual machines on a single hardware platform, or as discrete dedicated servers. This will ensure not only that the system is checked and restarted in a clean manner but will also restart all required services and resolve any memory leakages issues.
Check the data status of your database server. Is all expected data available and as expected, including for example, product and price changes? Have you checked that all Cegid imports have been successful – such as deliveries, stock movements and other integrations? Are click and collect integrations still working?
Check server maintenance: are there any pending Windows updates? If so, run them, and then perform a clean reboot. Check that all Cegid purge routines have completed successfully: if not, purging could take some time and may need manual intervention.
Next check that all POS devices in stores are powered on. After a long period of inactivity, devices are likely to have been switched off, while others may have failed or encountered other issues. Once any issues have been resolved, any pending software and data updates can then be processed automatically.
Check that the task scheduler is running as normal and that all routines are operational.
Ideally, every POS in your estate should be tested before the first day of trade. This should include testing all connected peripherals, and also an attempt to view centrally stored information pulled down from the Cegid servers.

In addition to system checks, we recommend that you consider operational updates, such as:

Amendments to promotions and videos/messages, if you use customer facing screens
Extensions to gift card/credit note expiry dates
Amendments to receipt messages

In addition to these checks, we recommend that on the first morning of trading, staff come in earlier than usual so that POS devices can be switched on, giving time for any further system downloads to be processed before trading commences.

Many retailers will have the skills required and availability of resource to complete these checks in-house. Others may need assistance or may wish to outsource the health check entirely. MWC Partners are here to assist as much or as little as required.