ACK work with The Works on a card processing evolution
The Works began life in 1981 when Mike and Jane Crossley recognised the opportunity to retail remaindered books at a value not previously represented on a large scale on the high street. Since then the company has grown to become the country’s leading supplier of value books and have expanded the product range to include stationery, artist’s materials, greeting cards, gift-wrap, music, videos, DVDs, games, puzzles and children’s activities; all at exceptional low prices.
Now in the hands of a new management team following the completion of a management buyout in July 2003, The Works have an annual turnover of £90m, in excess of over 200 stores and more than 1,500 employees. The Works Retail is Britain’s leading value book retailer and trades under its high street brand of The Works, along with its other brands of Book Depot, Banana Bookshop, Booksale and Art Depot in factory outlets and other out-of-town locations.
In 1999, following a move into a new Head Office and a purpose-built complex on a thriving industrial park at Minworth in Sutton Coldfield, Geoff Smith joined the organisation as IT Manager. Geoff has faced a number of challenges in this role providing an IT infrastructure within both the stores and at the distribution centre to support this rapidly growing organisation. One of these challenges has been in the provision of credit and debit card processing services.
At store level The Works invested, some time ago, in an EPoS solution based on the Toshiba TECPoS platform which runs an MS-DOS version of the ACK EFT software on the back-office machine. However, the business demands exposed a number of limitations in the original system - Geoff and his team defined a number of objectives they wished to fulfil within budget to meet the business demands:
• To upgrade the back office hardware to overcome a rising unreliability problem with the ageing equipment
• To deploy Windows XP for improved reliability and reduce the support burden
• Retain existing TECPoS EPoS units without change
• Plan for an IP VPN over ADSL to provide a better service and eliminate ISDN costs
A constraining factor in achieving these objectives was the ACK MD-DOS software which had not been designed to run under Windows XP nor support IP - The Works were initially faced with the prospect of compromising their plans and looked to ACK to provide a solution.
ACK have a core business philosophy that ensures retailers can retain their investment in ACK products by producing solutions which allow them to migrate to new technology without the risk of a ‘big bang’ approach - the maxim is evolution not revolution. The Works presented ACK a perfect opportunity to put this approach to the test.
ACK were able to provide a software 'shim' that ran on the new back office server running Windows XP which emulates the functions of the original MS-DOS product, thereby ensuring the EPoS units at front of store would continue to operate without change. The ACK software shim links directly to the standard ACK Windows product which is responsible for card validation and authorisation functions over the existing ISDN circuits.
Having achieved the first objective, the next part of The Works evolutionary objectives took shape: the replacement of ISDN lines at each store with a Broadband based Virtual Private Network (VPN) linking stores to head office using Internet Protocol (IP). One of the challenges was to ensure EFT transactions could be transported across this network and directed to the card acquirer. The Works elected to install two diverse LAN Extension Service circuits (LES) over MPLS, with the onward link from the head-office into the banking network via a Lease Line connection, backed up by ISDN circuits.
In order to utilise broadband for EFT traffic, The Works have installed another ACK product, Deterministic Queuing Server (DQS). This product manages the contention of multiple, concurrent on-line authorisation requests originating from the branches seeking access to the single link to the banking network. DQS ensures that an even response time to all stores is maintained and by providing dynamic many-to-few contention management.
The use of broadband within a retail environment has been gathering pace in recent years. Initially with some caution, where only regular store to head office traffic (e.g. price look up table updates, email, etc.) took this route - leaving most retailers to retain traditional data communication paths for EFT traffic. However, as the reliability of broadband technology has increased, retailers are now able to get more from their broadband services. Running EFT over broadband into the head office, as The Works have done, has increased store efficiency through faster authorisation times and at the same time, has contributed to significant cost savings as expensive ISDN circuits have been removed from the stores.
In addition to the successful migration of established stores from ISDN to broadband, The Works have an on-going expansion programme where new outlets are acquired at short notice and, in some cases, on short leases. The lead times for ADSL circuits has the potential to jeopardise new store openings, but Geoff and his team have found an effective solution in the shape of GPRS. They have purchased a stock of GPRS enabled routers and data SIM cards which are configured as additional nodes on their VPN - the stores are therefore able to access all of the services provided by the VPN including credit card authorisation using ACK software.
ACK have also supplied The Works with a copy of their central settlement submission software - Bulk Delivery System (BDS). This software ensures that transaction log files from each branch are consolidated into a single settlement file and delivered to the acquiring bank automatically overnight without the need for additional programs or operator intervention. BDS performs full record-level integrity checks before registering transactions in its database - this ensures that only valid transactions are processed which can help protect retailers from chargebacks.
This project has fully exploited the ACK philosophy of evolution not revolution and has allowed The Works to retain their investment in the Toshiba TECPOS EPoS system, gaining a few more years of service from a well performing solution. The move, in a controlled fashion, to a new back office system and data communication infrastructure has improved efficiency and provided cost savings along the way. The next step will again prove to be an evolution as The Works consider a move to a new EPoS system which will include the deployment of Chip & PIN - ACK are, of course, able to provide a logical and cost effective upgrade at the point of sale without change to the newly deployed solution: the investment in ACK solutions for the store back office and head office will remain, procedural changes and training needs will be minimal, thereby providing The Works with a continuing cost effective solution.
Geoff Smith said ‘The Works has gone through some exciting times in recent years and my department have been presented with a number of challenges as the company maintains its solid and continuing growth. We have never lost sight of the fact that all the best back office systems in the world are irrelevant if we cannot offer our customers an efficient credit/debit card payment service. Furthermore, the business relies on these funds reach our Bank account in a timely fashion: ACK understand these demands and have provided us with innovative and reliable solutions which offer value for money and a cohesive strategy for moving forward.’