With over 30,000 locations worldwide relying on our business
intelligence solutions, PXtech is at the forefront of retail data analysis. But
how do we make sure that the data you see is timely, accurate, and most of all,
complete?
POS data is the foundation upon which business intelligence
is built. Imagine a solution that missed even 1% of your sales data – it would
be worse than useless. We need a dependable source of data to provide the tools
that you rely on, and we've had to overcome many challenges to get it!
PXtech’s solution is nearly unique in the market, in that
we’re not tied to a single POS provider – you can use our system with many types
of POS system. This is great for customers because they don’t have to choose
their POS solution based on the reporting they want – PXtech allows you to
choose from different POS types and still use our world-class reporting
package.
Historically, we have supported Windows-based tills, but
recently the launch of the PXSmartHub has enabled us to move into the world of
ROM-based tills. Each platform has come with its own unique challenges which
must be overcome to produce a reliable source of data.
The heart of PXtech’s data solution is our agent software.
This clever little application gathers data from the ePOS software and
transmits it to our cloud servers for display on your screen. It was originally
developed for Windows-based tills – it gets installed as a service which runs
in the background, meaning there doesn’t have to be any clunky manual process
to send the data. Fetching the data from the POS can be difficult – different
ePOS systems use a myriad of different storage methods, and we have had to deal
with obscure database formats, XML, and good old plain text in order to get the
data that we need. Our development team is well-versed in working with
different systems, and ensuring that we are extracting the correct information
while not affecting the day-to-day operation of the till is paramount.
Once the agent has the data, we need to ensure that it gets
to us so that you can see it. Our cloud servers are much more reliable than the
average back office PC, but we need a dependable delivery service to ensure
that the data you’re seeing is complete. All data is transmitted using industry-standard
SSL encryption, so you can be sure that your sales data is safe in transit. We
use a guaranteed-once delivery procedure to ensure that data is not lost or
duplicated, and we’ve built a full message queue into the agents. This means
that even where stores may have an unreliable internet connection, the agent
will keep trying and ensure the messages make their way back once it’s back
online. We even have it working over 3G!
This solution worked very well for Windows-based POS
systems, but users of ROM-based systems were left out in the dark – until we
developed the PXSmartHub. Because we can’t install our agent software on a
ROM-based till, the PXSmartHub acts as an “agent in a box” – it’s a small unit
which connects to the network in a store and gathers data from the tills. It
works in the same way as our existing agents – taking live data from the tills
and queuing it for transport to the cloud. However, to ensure that no data is
lost due to network issues, it also performs an overnight reconciliation on the
till, making doubly sure that no messages were lost during the day.
More and more multi-site operators are realising that a
centralised business intelligence solution is an essential tool, is your
business keeping pace?
Phil Evans, product
manager, PXtech
