Microsoft technology for use in Retail industry

This week we were working with one of the largest retail and hospitality IT provider in the US, whose clients include some of the biggest names in the fast food industry. We had to validate the architecture that was being developed by the clients internal IT group - this was one of the more complex architecture we had seen largely because of the complexities involved in the retail industry.

How is the retail industry different?

· Well for one the life time and support required for a product can be very long, the client we are working with has to support technologies that are more than 20 years old – and its not mainframes that we are talking about (Gasp!). So if you make a mistake you have to support it for the rest of your life :).
· Retailers are very sensitive towards price in implementation of IT system – many of them still run POS systems that are based on DOS OS – they want new functionality, better user experience but are not willing to make huge investments in new hardware.
· If your servicing customer in the retail food industry/ supermarket chains etc then your product has to deal with a number of use cases that are implemented differently for each of the retail customer – what works in the QSR(Quick Service Restaurants) will not work in TSR(Table Service Restaurants) etc. In the past they would deploy customized solutions for each of the types of retail customers this in a short time would lead to a maintenance and deployment nightmare.
Being a close Microsoft partner one of first thoughts on implementing the next generation of Point Of Service(POS) was to use the Microsoft WEPOS (Windows Embedded Point Of Service) based platform. This was not a huge challenge since the client was also considering leaning to implementing their next generation solution using a WEPOS based system. WEPOS is based on the XP Embedded OS – but unlike XP Embedded the individual software components (approx 11,000 in case of XP embedded) don’t have to be individually configured. WEPOS come out of the box with preinstalled components. This benefits the customers of WEPOS since they know what the components they get out of the box would be and will be available across any WEPOS box. As per the market survey conducted in 2005 by IHL Consulting group 74% of all POS systems implemented were based on Windows platform and this number has been growing ever since and there has been a strong adoption for WEPOS.






In summary WEPOS provides
· Optimized for retail market
· .NET for POS (part of the WEPOS SDK) provides a managed implementation for the UPOS (Unified POS) standard hence the connectivity to devices is abstracted away
· Provides the plug and play features similar to a standard XP box
· WEPOS lowers the cost of implementing solutions via a simplified interface (.NET for POS) and with large number of hardware partners providing interfaces to it.
· Microsoft has a 10 year lifetime support for WEPOS




The challenges we faced when architecting the solution was:
· The system in order to be flexible had to be dynamic/ metadata drive across presentation layer, business tier and data layer. However the system had to support offline scenario (disconnected environment) so much of this logic would reside on the WEPOS box (obviously with limited hardware resources)
· Most of the POS devices need to adhere to a minimum number of gestures per second requirements – so when building the new system with heavy graphics (using WPF)/ dynamic business logic(WF) etc we had to ensure that the design would be highly optimized for performance.
· One of the issues with the current WEPOS is that .NET 3.0 is not officially supported. Note that you can install .NET 3.x on the box and it will work – however customers cannot reach out to Microsoft for support. This delay in supporting .NET 3.0 in WEPOS is because the Microsoft WEPOS team rolls up to the XPE team who had delayed the support for .NET 3.0. However the client would be releasing their product at a time when WEPOS would support .NET 3.0 so the design was build around the capabilities of .NET 3.0