Networked Applications Eliminate The Wait By Matt Pillar Integrated Solutions for Retailers April 2004

Scotty Creason likes waiting about as much as customers at MAPCO Express, Inc. (Franklin, TN) do. That is to say, he doesn't like waiting at all. Creason is manager of IT at MAPCO, a 243-store gas station/convenience store chain. Not long ago, the company's dial-up connectivity architecture kept Creason, his stores, and his customers waiting all the time. It kept customers waiting in the cold at the pump for credit card authorizations. It kept his stores waiting in the dark for things like POS system upgrades. In the meantime, Creason and his staff were waiting for the right high-bandwidth network to come along and save the day - one that would enable centralized, distributed applications while empowering the enterprise with real-time communication.

Applications Drive An Appetite For Bandwidth
"We wanted to push sales data back to the corporate office, we wanted to speed up transactions, and we wanted to centralize technologies we couldn't centralize with dial-up," says Creason. That dial-up connectivity wasn't enabling these things was not for lack of trying, mind you. MAPCO had been deploying monthly (if not more frequent) POS upgrades to its proprietary store systems in dial-up mode, which proved not only a technical challenge, but a logistical one, as well. Ed Morgan, VP of treasury and technology at MAPCO, said it took between five and seven days to deploy upgrades to stores in this fashion. "We had to split up the stores because we only had the bandwidth to update 20 stores per night, and even then it took all night and tied up the modems," he says.

Credit card authorization, a critical application for gas stations where pay-at-the-pump customers can grow impatient (especially during winter), also floundered. "There's a lot of static over phone lines," says Creason. "A card swiped at the pump might go through the first time in 15 or 20 seconds, or it might take three tries to go through. In the worst-case scenario, it might take a minute and a half to process, or it might not go through at all, prompting customers to see the cashier," he says.

Likewise, poor connectivity caused problems when stores transferred daily sales reports to headquarters. Bad phone line connections caused truncated reports and corrupted data, inevitably leading to data loss. Stores frequently had to retransmit information, or the bad data would be discovered weeks later. All this waiting didn't come without a cost. With remote sites, there were also long distance fees accumulating to the tune of $30,000 per month. Bandwidth-eating applications like e-mail simply were not an option.

VSAT? DSL? Cable? Frame?
MAPCO was effectively trying to service 243 stores out of the hatchback of a Ford Escort. It needed something more along the lines of a Boeing 757 cargo plane. The company had considered building a VSAT (very small aperture terminal) satellite network or MPLS WAN (wide area network) in the past, but questioned the latency of the former and found the latter cost prohibitive. In 2003, MAPCO simultaneously piloted three networking technologies. One store tested VSAT, another tested frame relay, while two others tried Cybera's (Nashville, TN) managed private network. "After 45 days of piloting, we sifted through our objectives and discovered that Cybera's network would enable applications VSAT could not," says Creason. For instance, centralized digital video surveillance was high on the company's wish list, but it's an application VSAT could not accommodate. VoIP (voice over Internet Protocol) is another technology MAPCO plans to implement, but it fears a VSAT network would be taxed by the bandwidth. MAPCO also wanted to effectively build a firewall at each location, and it had reservations about the security of VSAT technology. The company decided to hire Cybera to build and manage its WAN, which required the integration of Cisco, Netopia, Efficient, Covad, NewEdge, BellSouth, and AT&T equipment and carriers.

But the decision to roll out a private WAN, 75% of which would be DSL (digital subscriber line)-based, brought more than just integration challenges. Ordering and installing this volume of DSL required address coordination between Cybera, MAPCO, the telephone companies, and Emergency 911, for instance. Robin Perry, network administrator at MAPCO, says some 20% of its locations had bad address issues - ranging from incorrect street numbers to missing punctuation - that were discovered during the DSL ordering phase. This unexpected wrinkle put a slight delay in the rollout, forcing MAPCO and Cybera to sift through MAPCO store addresses, clean them up, and work with the utilities to update them. Once implemented, however, the benefits of the network became abundantly clear.

Managed Network Saves Time, Money
Perry says the new WAN is not only saving the company more than $30,000 in monthly long distance fees, but because the network enables remote support down to the PC level, the company has seen a 15-minute per-call reduction in the duration of in-house POS support calls, which now average only 5 minutes each.

MAPCO's WAN now consists of a private DSL or MPLS connection between each store location and its headquarters, which keeps the company from having to traverse the dangerous public Internet with its precious data. This gives the retailer complete control of its bandwidth, for which it pays, on average, $150 per month per site. Morgan says even 128k frame relay connections would cost in the neighborhood of three times that amount. "We set a budget for the install of high-speed lines this past year. When we initially began looking at a VSAT option, we were told we could do approximately 50-75 stores with that budget. We did 243 sites on that budget with Cybera," adds Creason.

"A year ago, stores could not send transactional details up to headquarters," says Creason. "Today, they're transmitting all of their credit card detail for reconciliation at the transaction level. We're also creating a data warehouse that will take that transaction detail and allow us to perform market-basket analysis."

The waiting game is effectively over for all parties involved. Stores no longer have to wait all week for their POS upgrades. Today, updates are transferred to all stores simultaneously overnight, with time and bandwidth to spare for applications like the 24-hour digital video surveillance system the company is currently rolling out. Stores are also treated to an always-on e-mail application, and for their part, MAPCO customers can cut to the chase now, too. Instead of waiting impatiently for credit cards to authorize, a swipe of the card now yields an authorization to pump in two or three seconds. As for MAPCO's IT staff, there's no more waiting to distribute applications from headquarters. Instead of waiting, it's proactively looking for more money-saving technology to deploy, and its WAN is no longer a barrier to implementation.

Gain Speed, Security With A Broadband WAN
Private, managed networks are becoming a popular WAN (wide area network) choice for retailers interested in driving applications to multiple stores from a central location. The advantages of centralizing retail management systems are many, and the security offered by private networks is attractive to Internet-skittish retailers. Each managed network provider takes a different approach to piecing the elements of an enterprise together. Cybera (Nashville, TN) offers its SmartNetwork, which, in some cases, ties many forms of last-mile access into one cohesive, albeit hybrid, WAN.

"We can integrate any form of broadband like cable and DSL [digital subscriber line] with older and legacy forms of access like frame relay and private line, in a single private network that never touches the public Internet," says Amanda Cecconi, VP of marketing for Cybera. "Ultimately, we create a turnkey managed network at prices that typically average $150 per site, per month."

Cybera provides customers with all the equipment necessary to integrate the access lines, creating a broadband, wide area private network between all their stores for internal communication, inventory applications, payment processing, POS applications, and more. "This price is a small step up from dial-up, but far less than straight frame relay, or trying to hire the staff necessary to build the network on your own," says Cliff Duffey, CEO at Cybera.

Duffey says the SmartNetwork incorporates the building blocks of traditional networks, things like routers and firewalls that are most commonly physical boxes sitting at each store or location. "We've taken those boxes and built them into the network. It's like the difference between yesterday's answering machine and today's voice mail application. The features are all built into the network and delivered as part of the service, eliminating the capital costs associated with this hardware," he explains.

Keep Employees Safe, Honest With Video Surveillance
Convenience store and gas retailer MAPCO Express, Inc. (Franklin, TN) began rolling out digital surveillance to its 243 stores early in 2004. Today, any of its operational managers can access store video from their office machines at store headquarters, or they can do it from home via the company's private network. "We have two-way audio monitoring on that as well, so we can hear and see everything that goes on in the stores in real time," says Scotty Creason, manager of IT at MAPCO. Many factors went into the decision to roll out digital surveillance at MAPCO, including employee and customer security and a focus on LP (loss prevention).

Ed Morgan, VP of treasury and technology at MAPCO, says the retailer's new high-bandwidth WAN (wide are network) enables the company to transmit live video without its network going down or latency issues. MAPCO can now burn digital images or footage it needs right at the store or corporate level for internal loss prevention purposes, or send footage along to law enforcement officers via the Internet. In fact, MAPCO has partnered with the Memphis Police Department to take its security system even further. MAPCO provides the department office space at one of its networked stores - office space that's equipped with a system allowing police to remotely monitor any MAPCO store in the city of Memphis.

Promotions, Gift Cards Enabled By High-Speed Networks
MAPCO Express, Inc. (Franklin, TN), a 243-store gas and convenience store chain, is also a huge outlet for Tennessee Lottery tickets. On the Monday prior to the Super Bowl, MAPCO decided to run an impromptu promotion with its lottery ticket consumers. The premise was simple; bring your losing lottery tickets back to the store with your name and phone number written on the back, and you'd be entered into a drawing for a big-screen TV. After distributing the promotion's rules to its store via its private network, the promotion was in full gear the following day. On Super Bowl Sunday, the lucky winner received the TV in time for the big game.

Gift cards, or prepaid express cards, are another application enabled by the network, says Ed Morgan, VP of treasury and technology at MAPCO. "The speed of the transaction with our gift card is phenomenal, and speed is essential to our business. We rolled that out late last fall with Fifth Third Bank (Cincinnati), and we'll be marketing it as a prepaid card much more in the coming year," he says.

©2004 Corry Publishing