Getting Retail-J Ready to Trade After Lockdown

17 Mar 2021

With retail stores scheduled to open on April 12 as part of the government’s plans to release lockdown, now is the time to ensure that your Retail-J POS system is ready to trade. Making some checks now will help ensure that there are no surprises and avoid system disruption when stores open.

Retailers using Retail-J should start by focusing on Estate Manager. First, establish that all POS and monitored peripheral devices can connect. After a long period of inactivity, some devices may have switched off, failed or encountered an issue. Establishing what you can and can’t see will help to define the next phase.

MWC Partners recommend:

Power your Estate Manager down and perform a clean reboot. This will restart all required services and resolve any memory leakage issues.
Check the data status of your Estate Manager. Is all expected information available for transmission? Has all inbound data been processed? Have the purge routines completed successfully? If not, purging could take some time and may need manual intervention.
Ensure that no new data is transmitted to your store estate until you are happy with the status of your central Estate Manager.
Check the communications between your Estate Manager and remote Back Office services, master POS and slave POS. This will not only provide confidence that your estate can be contacted but it will also give you time to resolve any issues encountered.
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.

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

If there is any chance that your POS could be out of sync with your Estate Manager, we highly recommend that a full broadcast be scheduled for all devices in your estate. A full broadcast is not a quick process, but hopefully there will be time to initiate one for each device, monitor its performance and resolve any issues before the first day of trading.

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.