CASE STUDY #1:
Retail Point of Sale

Real life solutions that have been designed and provided by MRE Consulting Group and allied firms.

A retail sales company has a large investment in a custom point-of-sale software system that runs on an aging network which no longer runs the software reliably.  The operation includes 5 stores and runs 7 days a week.

The distance between stores makes system administration difficult and the  customer's previous experience with Windows-based networks has caused a reluctance to replace the original network with Windows workstations connected together in a peer-to-peer network or to an NT server.  The budget for the 5 stores is limited so that installing a Novell network with a dedicated server at each store is not possible.

Keeping the customer's budgetary needs in mind, we suggested the implementation of a terminal-based network running the VM386 operating system.  This allows  the customer to retain the original point-of-sale software without any modifications, plus keep the onsite maintenance of each store to a minimum.

The customer replaced all the old store systems with new ones and  the project is brought in under budget.  3 years later, after over 43,000 hours of business operations, the replacement system has had only one problem, related to a bad hard drive and not the VM386 operating system.

Additionally, the customer gained increased productivity by being able to administer data changes remotely during normal store operations, a feature which had not been available on the previous system.