Vanuatu

Au Bon Marche has four supermarkets, three petrol stations (fuel outlets) and wholesale businesses in their enterprise. They needed a suitable product to increase business productively while reducing user error. Amicus point of sale system was the perfect candidate for the job, with a fully a scalable platform and multisite capabilities and powerful stock management Amicus could certainly deliver. Deploying Amicus POS on a large scale is quite a stressful and challenging task at the best of times. But when it’s deployed 6,000 miles away from Hobart it’s even more of a challenge. Everything from the System design to shipping the hardware had to be completed.

The installation, in total took three weeks to complete and included installing 25 POS Terminals, 50 Back Office Terminals, 5 Servers and networking equipment. User training was also a challenge, as majority of users weren’t business or IT savvy. Trying to explain the ins and outs of stock management proved to be difficult. But after the initial hurdle, the users have picked it up quite well and see Amicus POS as a powerful business application.

The project started in January of 2006, and to date is still continuing. We have had to upgrade the majority of the Servers due to the sheer number of sales (10.5 Million sales and 37.5 Million items sold). They now operate one HP DL585 G5 Server (16 Cores in total) four HP ML350 G5 Servers and one HP DL365 to drive their Enterprise. They also have a site to site GHSDL network powered by Cisco and a Watchguard X550e to protect email/web and to also filter internet access.

In total, I have spent in excess of five months in Vanuatu over 4 years during ten trips. Working in Vanuatu on this project can be quite demanding at times, however it is extremely rewarding, knowing that Neotechnology is helping Au Bon Marche do what they do, but better.