WHAT THEY NEEDED: Agile infrastructure for marketing promotions and new store operations

Founded in 1936, Stinker is a 104 -store convenience chain operating across Idaho, Wyoming, and Colorado.

The marketing and store operations team wanted to prioritize staying ahead of the competition, as well as to drive increased revenue and enhance the customer experience. In order to do so, they needed the agility to scale real-time pricing promotions across the store estate, including unique themed food and drink offers and the ability to test and deploy new applications quickly in-store. The problem was that Stinker’s legacy infrastructure, point-of-sale (POS) and back office systems, made any changes in the store extremely complex, time consuming and expensive. Coupled with hardware reliability issues resulting in on-site repairs to POS hard drives, it was clear that change was needed.

The Stinker IT team needed to modernize their store infrastructure at both the front and back end, with expanded capabilities and features not offered on their legacy POS. They wanted a company that had significant experience in edge infrastructure software specifically within retail. After assessing three vendors they decided no one could match the virtualization, containerization and innovation experience that NCR Voyix offers at the retail edge.

WHAT WE DELIVERED: NCR Voyix Edge. A future-proof virtualized store infrastructure.

NCR Voyix went on-site and created a roadmap with agreed goals and timescales. A strong partnership was established with labs at NCR Voyix headquarters in Atlanta, Georgia, and Stinker in Boise, Idaho, to ensure the project could be completed with maximum efficiency. This detailed preparation meant Stinker had a virtualized server standardized to their own requirements, fully configured and ready to go, making rapid deployment across the store estate easy.

”This is the first time Stinkers has been delighted during an implementation and Go Live. The NCR Voyix team was always 1 or 2 steps ahead of Stinker and we appreciate the technical knowledge combined with strong program management leadership. NCR Voyix is definitely our go-to strategic solution provider for us to run the store.”
– Cory Mooney, Vice President - IT, Stinker

By virtualizing the POS, Site Controller and Fuel Controller with dual edge servers and seamless integration to 3rd party back-office applications NCR Voyix Edge created a fully virtualized store with the flexibility to make rapid changes and meet the demands of the business, while ensuring enhanced resilience. All peripherals such as scanner, printer and cash drawer were retained due to the unique virtualization capabilities of NCR Voyix Edge that can overcome the complexity of full peripheral integration with a company’s existing hardware stack.

The rollout process took place with minimal business disruption as the software was pre-staged on virtualized servers remotely before deployment at each store.

Further, there were zero cancellations due to NCR Voyix Edge’s unique rollback capabilities, enabling any software updates during the staging process for live store deployments to be rolled back if required.

WHAT HAPPENED NEXT:

”Each store could be deployed in a matter of hours, we didn’t even have to do these in the middle of the night. When you consider that’s front and back end store systems with full technical integration to 3rd party applications that’s quite a feat.”
– Cory Mooney, Vice President - IT, Stinker

Having a fully virtualized modern store environment with the latest POS software and the flexibility to retain their legacy hardware has had a significant effect on both the bottom line and the customer experience.

Go To Market Agility – Marketing and Store Operations are using the platform to launch regular pricing promotions, from happy hour to themed days across the store estate, with comprehensive reporting to make a real impact on the bottom line.

Reduced Total Cost of Ownership – Virtualization has enabled Stinker to run the latest software on their existing hardware, achieving improved store system performance and 60% hardware cost savings on POS and 80% on back office.

Continuous operations – Removing single points of failure and installing dual edge servers for software updates and rollback has delivered maximum uptime at the pump and in the store. Support tickets are forecast to reduce by 50% as new remote support and maintenance for maintaining and managing the virtualized store solution delivers enhanced resilience.

Rapid Growth – As Stinker drives growth through new store acquisitions, the agnostic hardware approach from NCR Voyix and ability to stage a pre-configured virtualized server, has resulted in 70% faster store rollout.

Future-Proof Innovation – Stinker keeps pushing forward with their flexible platform, testing and deploying both NCR Voyix and 3rd party applications. Integrations within the software stack now take a matter of weeks whereas previously they took months to implement. Recently, they have launched a new mobile app with loyalty points, integrated Punchh and Rovertown and are now evaluating integrations with Grubhub and DoorDash.

”NCR Voyix Edge is a game changer and is exactly what we were looking for from our technology partner. NCR Voyix Edge is unique with this offering.”
– Cory Mooney, Vice President - IT, Stinker