Food Lion needed a powerful and flexible new POS tool to help them offer an improved experience to their customers and employees alike; with a quick and efficient install that took approximately three three hours NCR Voyix POS EX made their goals a reality for the first of their 1000+ stores.

Transitioning onto a new POS solution can be a daunting task for an enterprise business—even when that transition promises a whole host of better experiences for the stores and opportunities to reduce IT costs. For Food Lion, their first deployment of NCR Voyix POS EX to operate an entire grocery store offered a taste of the efficiency to come.

To meet evolving customer needs and stay ahead of the competition, Food Lion decided to make an investment in new technology and implement a point-of-sale solution which took advantage the best technologies available today. What they found in NCR Voyix’s solution was a solution different from anything they had ever seen before: an architecturally distinct POS that enables the entire store to run as if it’s running a single operating system. Because it was built on Edge infrastructure, the new system offered better resilience, enhanced flexibility, and improved network efficiency.

“The smoothest go-live experience I've ever seen”
- Ken Bolick, VP of Retail Systems, Food Lion

In the pilot store, which featured 6 cashier-assisted checkout lanes, the benefits were immediately apparent to executives and store employees alike. Instead of having to face lengthy downtime during the rollout, deployment was largely hands-off and only took about three hours. In the stores that follow, this process of converting a store quickly and safely before business hours will be replicated with even further refinements and more autonomously. The days immediately after the rollout, were busy with more than the usual sales activity, but uneventful relative to IT’s expectations, with no major problems arising from the transition.  Ken Bolick, VP of Retail Systems, called the rollout process, “the smoothest go-live experience [he’s] ever seen” for a system of this scale and capability.

“We accomplished in a few hours what would have taken us weeks on any other POS system.”
- Kathleen Hohenstein. NGPOS Program Director, Food Lion

Within a week of the install, the store experienced no downtime and no disruption of their ability to transact business on any of the lanes. Debbie Lineberry, the store’s customer service manager, praised the new POS, calling it “intuitive, easy to use, and efficient.” When ADUSA did decide to make some changes to the software, they were amazed at how much easier and quicker this process could be. With near instantaneous software updates to the lab, they could begin their pre-production testing quickly and with confidence that the configuration matched what they could expect in the store. Then, when their testing was complete in just a few hours, they found the update of the live store to be just as quick, painless and reliable. In the words of the NGPOS Program Director, Kathleen Hohenstein, “We accomplished in a few hours what would have taken us weeks on any other POS system.” This radical change in the way the system software can be updated will allow the POS to adapt to changing needs almost as quickly as those needs can be identified and implemented in the software.  Soon, they plan to roll out further enhancements, including self-checkout, mobile POS, and more, in their other stores.

For cashiers, who spend more time than others interacting directly with the point of sale, the system was simple to learn and efficient to use over the course of their shifts. The store set up a dedicated training lane in advance of the store’s conversion to help cashiers learn the new system’s streamlined interface; On average, cashiers   became comfortable and efficient with the new system within an hour of their first use with real customers, confidently managing transactions and meeting customer expectations. They reported that it took significantly fewer touches than before to accomplish some tasks. Cashiers were also delighted to gain the ability to select and save their user preferences, making starting a shift less of a hassle. One employee made use of the software’s left-hand mode, a feature that made her job more comfortable to sustain.

“The NCR Voyix POS EX solution s straightforward with features, we believe, will support our ever-evolving needs.”
- Jan Owens, Manager of Front End Operations for Food Lion

Solutions like NCR Voyix POS EX are valuable resources for businesses like Food Lion, where issues like downtime, slow deployment, and cashier confusion can cause significant harm to their customer experience. By enabling store operations to run smoothly, a powerful POS system sets the store apart from the competition and contributes to their long-term growth and success.