For 30 years, Trade Link has been a recognised specialist in retail IT systems, trusted to modernise and keep mission-critical systems running flawlessly. But while those in the know have long been aware of the team’s capabilities, the pace and scale of a recent implementation has elevated their status in the industry.
Juan Fourie, director of the professional services division at Trade Link, said a particularly ambitious roll-out – upgrading 120 000 items at 29 000 point of sale systems in 3 500 stores across South Africa in just six months – illustrates that Trade Link can deliver at pace and scale.
Trade Link CEO Ahmed Laher said the company’s technology partners abroad are astonished by the speed and success of its biggest implementation to date. “They said a project like this would normally take up to two years to roll out,” he said.
Successfully pulling off a project at this pace and scale was dependent on Trade Link’s “secret sauce” – a combination of exceptional teamwork, decades of experience and a 200-strong project management and support team working in the background to enable the field teams.
Trade Link fields hundreds of technicians based out of offices and satellite hubs across South Africa. “This allows us to consistently exceed our contractual service level agreements. A single major customer might log up to 20 000 calls a month, so our field teams have to be able to get to them quickly,” said Fourie.
For one of its largest retail customers, Trade Link’s field services team covers an average of 400 000km a month simply managing day-to-day issues.
In its biggest project to date, Trade Link deployed 120 field technicians in teams, backed by headquarters working around the clock, to upgrade point of sales systems at a rate of 700 lanes and 35-40 stores per night at the peak of the project.
Agility matters
For Fourie and the team, the most important component of the project was the planning phase. “Our initial planning took around a month, with our project plan running a month in advance. We had different teams – one focusing on the installation, one doing logistics and the third one managing reverse logistics.”
Despite exhaustive planning, external factors could – and did – hamper processes. Fourie said: “There were strikes, marathons or festivals blocking routes and preventing us from working in a particular store as planned. We had consultants and technicians getting stuck in the snow in the Drakenberg, breaking down in a rural area and having to be towed by a tractor and getting into a road accident. We had to remain agile and find workarounds to get the projects back on track, no matter what happened.”
Complicating matters, the team could only work at night when stores were closed. If they worked through the night, however, they sometimes missed breakfast and check-out time at their accommodations.
“Our internal support teams, who manage car and accommodation bookings, had to negotiate for the guys to get breakfast and a shower, even if they hadn’t slept in their rooms and checkout time had passed,” he explained. “We had to track who hadn’t slept and insist they rest. We sent them blankets so they could rest in transit, which may have saved lives when some of them got stuck in the snow in KwaZulu-Natal.”
Laher added: “Staff welfare is a key focus for us and Juan knows his team, so when he saw they were flagging, he’d buy them energy drinks or cupcakes, or send them home for a short break with their families. As a company, we believe in caring for our teams and we make deliberate efforts to recognise and reward people, which encourages them to deliver their best for the customer.”
Passion, experience and agility go a long way to ensuring Trade Link’s success in the retail space, Laher said. “We aren’t the biggest company, but then we don’t have layers of management and red tape either. We’re agile and we have the capability to deliver at incredible scale and pace. We do what we do really well,” he concluded.
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