The POS modernization program helped the automotive services franchisee chain of the US petroleum major reduce annual application support cost by 50% at more than 1800 stores

Client Background 

Client: Wholly owned, indirect subsidiary of an Oil & Gas (O&G) supermajor
Operations: Has a chain of more than 1,800 franchise-owned businesses
Services: Pioneer in the lube and automotive preventive maintenance industry. The franchisees offer automotive services to about 20 million customers each year in North America and Canada

Challenge

The automotive service industry is in a transformative phase. However, there are barriers that prevented the expansion of customer offerings. The inability to track store-level information resulted in lost business and several factors were creating inefficiencies in recovery from franchisees. On the other hand, the point of sale (POS) experience for customers needed to be improved and made efficient, seamless, accurate and consistent. It was the quality of this experience that primarily drove customer loyalty and the ability to cross sell and upsell.

The O&G supermajor’s subsidiary was under pressure to modernize their legacy POS application as the existing system was on extended support and was also non-scalable. They wanted to leverage technology and change this to improve customer experience, enable business growth and gain competitive advantage.

Solution

Wipro came up with a solution which not only transformed their POS application to have a better user experience, but also helped them have a better franchisee network. The solution was rolled out to more than 1800 stores.

• Re-platformed the legacy system and migrated data from the client’s data center to Wipro’s managed Azure Cloud infrastructure
• Technical architecture leveraged a .NET framework, consisted of 2 million lines of code and consolidated 15 terabyte of data across 39 legacy database instances
•  To ensure scalability, Wipro built a co-host location with dedicated 1 GB bandwidth and the ability to connect 5,000 concurrent VPN connections to the Azure VM server 
• The POS system was then deployed across 1,910 franchised stores and 9,500 POS machines, spread across 50 states

It was backed by the expertise of 408 technicians. The POS modernization program was successfully deployed within 18 months from start to finish. 

Business Impact

The immediate impact of the modernized POS system was the ability of the O&G supermajor’s subsidiary to improve recovery from franchisee stores. The network of stores could also expand service offerings and track store-level information, thereby improving decision-making, bringing in more customers and improving customer experience.

The transformation helped differentiate the brand to potential entrepreneurs, thereby expanding the store network and improving the brand’s position in the Do-It-For-Me (DIFM) market.