Unified Retail Device Management Increases Uptime

Every retailer seeks operational efficiencies and cost reductions as digital transformation sweep the sector. However, this is easier said than done as they contend with a number of device kinds, including point-of-sale and digital displays. Consider then the tremendous size at which a huge retailer works, with hundreds of devices in each shop and hundreds or thousands of locations.

What if retail operations ran as efficiently as a car? Automobiles of today tell us when the tire pressure is low, when an oil change is necessary, and when it is time to replace the brake pads. Under the hood, sensors and computers are hard at work monitoring, controlling, and fine-tuning while providing the driver with information to prevent a breakdown.

Management of Retail Devices Unified

Using a device-agnostic platform, The Box solution simplifies retail operating difficulties. Its remote monitoring and maintenance capabilities enable insight over the whole system through a single management system. This allows merchants to replace their old service approach with a centralized, automated, and predictive strategy.

The Inefi agent mediates between mission-critical devices, their related peripherals, and a cloud-based intelligent management system for remote monitoring. This enables problem-solving at the endpoint even before an issue may arise.

"With our approach, sales associates whose primary responsibility is to serve clients do not wind up debugging issues," says Patterson. And IT personnel need not depend on someone discovering a problem and reporting it after the fact.

Once an issue has been recognized, it may often be fixed automatically. According to retailers using Inefi Spotlight, engineering visits to retail locations may be reduced by up to 35 percent yearly, minimizing expenses associated with service calls and downtime.

Information-Driven Insights

The savings may be substantial. One of the biggest stores in the United Kingdom, with over 20,000 outlets and hundreds of thousands of gadgets, was evaluated by Box. Twenty percent of its field service calls in a given year were related to a single kind of printer.

Instead of prioritizing the problem, the service provider would dispatch an engineer to change out the printer, repair it, and return it to inventory, resulting in increased capital expenditures and wasted staff time. "Our client was never able to identify the source of the issue," adds Patterson. Therefore, there was never any data-driven insight into the problem's cause.

The Inefi solution was able to gather granular data from the printer, identify the core cause of the issue, and remotely deploy a fix. Eliminating this one printer problem would reduce the retailer's field service requests to single-digit percentages, making them far more manageable.

BI Maximizes Efficiency

Business intelligence may save enormous sums of money by enhancing the capacity to control the use of devices throughout a whole retail network. In a typical scenario, a merchant may discover three of six Point-of-Sale (PoS) terminals are used regularly during the day, while the other three remain inactive.

In this example, since the Inefi platform centrally monitors and analyzes device use, shop managers may spread out terminal usage, which increases equipment wear and tear.

The platform uses intel® Active Management Technology (Intel® AMT) and Intel vPro® software for its remote management features, including troubleshooting and software update management. It may even enhance energy efficiency by remotely regulating the power states of endpoints.

And with out-of-band support, remote monitoring and troubleshooting remain uninterrupted even if the operating system fails.

Retail Operations Running on All Cylinders

As edge-to-cloud AI technologies are increasingly adopted, predictive and automated device management advantages will continue to increase. Trends in data over time might reveal, for instance, that panel PCs are prone to fail after a certain amount of transactions.

With the capacity to schedule equipment maintenance cycles, merchants are better equipped to operate smoothly, like our cars. Patterson says, "If we can give what we experience every day when we walk into our automobiles via connected, predictive platforms, then that is our objective, and that is ultimately the future."

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