The Australian 7-Eleven convenience chain is looking to Australia and New Zealand Banking Group for a new electronic funds transfer (EFT) system for its 386 stores, replacing its previous in-house system.
The Australian 7-Eleven convenience chain is looking to Australia and New Zealand Banking Group for a new electronic funds transfer (EFT) system for its 386 stores, replacing its previous in-house system.
Dennis Lewis (Credit: Dennis Lewis)
"We were going to have to do some significant upgrades to the
current solution to make it compliant with all of the new demands
of the card issuers in terms of security and encryption and all of
those things," 7-Eleven CIO Dennis Lewis told ZDNet.com.au.
It made more sense to replace it with an up-to-date system, he said.
Although the new system would in part be funded via merchant
fees, there was still some capital investment on the system, Lewis
said. He thought it was worth it. "It's something that takes us
forward rather than shoring up an old solution," he said.
The business case for developing an EFT system in-house had been
badly damaged by rules made by the Reserve Bank on interchange fees
since 7-Eleven developed its system seven years ago, Lewis said.
"The banks used to pay us quite high fees for EFT transactions. The
changes in all the rules reduced our income quite significantly,"
he said.
Lewis' 19-strong IT team was currently testing the new system. He hoped to
see it rolled out to the stores by this Christmas. He would not comment on the cost of the system.
The
changes in all the rules reduced our income quite significantly.
Dennis Lewis
This project hasn't been the only iron in Lewis' fire. Last year
he completed an SAP upgrade that was the basis for 7-Eleven's SAP
business intelligence implementation, phase one of which went live
in December.
Although it was too early yet to really see the benefits, he
said that some advantages of the new system were already flowing
through. "They're able now to really monitor what's happening at a
store level in terms of inventory," he said.
It was used extensively in supply negotiations. "Having access
to really good information that we can get quickly kind of changes
a bit of the negotiations with our suppliers, because we've probably
got better information than they have, which previously we didn't,"
he said.
A bevy of manual reporting was also being automated, to save
staff time.
Phase two is to move the use of the system to the stores, not
just the head office. Lewis was deciding what information the
stores could use without running the danger of becoming lost under an avalanche of data.
"Technically we have all the capability in place, it's just really
a question of what do we want to give them," he said.
Another key project has been what he calls eServices,
carried out with a company called Touch Networks. The project
revolves around creating the capability to sell lottery tickets or
transport cards using the chain's Radiant point of sale system
instead of through a separate kiosk run by the ticket seller in the
7-Eleven store.
It makes life a hell of a lot
easier at the store level.
Dennis Lewis
"Developing the capability and integrating it into our system
was massive," Lewis said. "It was at the application level: how do
you integrate something so that our touchscreen point of sale can
interact with a piece of software that then goes back over the
network and interacts with somebody else's back-end database,
creates a transaction and hands it back over to the point of sale
so you can sell it to the customer."
The idea was to get really good integration at a generic level
so that Lewis' team didn't have to keep changing the point of sale
software.
Getting rid of kiosks not only frees up real estate on the store
counters, but also means that the stores don't have to reconcile
revenues from two different systems. "It makes life a hell of a lot
easier at the store level," he said.
Lewis is also looking at being able to link other kiosks into
the new system. These kiosks would be away from the front counter
and would allow customers to access self-serve products, which
require too much data entry to be done at the counter, such as
e-tag top ups that require more detailed personal
information.
