Extra Supermarket (extra.com.fj) opened its doors in Lautoka, the Sugar City of Fiji in August 2017. From its inception, Extra Supermarket redefined grocery shopping in Fiji and ushered in the era of international standards of shopping in Fiji with aesthetically designed, air-conditioned stores. The stores were designed with a strong focus on the comfort and convenience of the customers – this meant wider aisles to allow for easy movement of shopping carts, adequate car parking, a well-trained team of friendly and courteous staff, a wide range of products with prices that provided true value for money.
The leadership team has extensive experience in the grocery supermarket industry, especially the industry as it functions in Fiji with strong Government oversight, stiff competition, and customers who are highly engaged and vocal about their preferences. This experience has provided the leadership with the skills and resilience that drove aggressive growth despite the challenges posed by the COVID-19 pandemic and the resultant economic slowdown. By swiftly responding to changing market conditions, implementing robust safety measures, and leveraging technology to enhance customer engagement, Extra Supermarket has been able to navigate through turbulent times and emerge stronger than ever.
A key strength of Extra Supermarket is the range of products on offer. They sell everything from basic vegetables such as Onions and Potatoes, basic groceries like flour, rice, and oil to high-quality homeware, a range of toys, televisions, electric bicycles, etc. They also operate a deli inside the store and sell barista-type coffee, ready-to-eat salads, cakes, etc.
In addition, they have large walk-in liquor areas where they sell a very wide variety of wines, beer and spirits. All this meant high transaction volumes.
As early as June 2020, the leadership recognized that the software that they were using would not be able to support their planned growth and engaged with the leadership team at Tekovai to design and develop a software solution that would take Extra Supermarket into the future and allow them to expand and the pace they wanted to. At this time, they had only two branches in operation – the first branch at Lautoka and another one in Flagstaff, Suva.
Extra wanted an ERP system that was centered on a Point of Sale that had to be designed from the ground up to support high-volume, multi-location retail environments.
The technical team at Tekovai Solutions Pvt Limited is led by a Chartered Accountant with a powerful blend of business knowledge and technical acumen having than 7 years of experience as the Chief Information Officer of a supermarket chain in Fiji. Extra Supermarket and Tekovai decided to leverage this experience and build a world-class POS Centric ERP Solution that would meet and exceed Extra Supermarket’s expectations
TekoSphere (branded as ExtraPOS for Extra Supermarket) was built with a development effort of almost 3 years. It is a full-featured ERP for trading that is built around a very powerful and scalable Point of Sale system. The product is specifically engineered to handle high volumes and work in a distributed environment with WAN connectivity between the various branches.
The solution was implemented by a team that went on-site to Fiji. The implementation, done in a record time of 3 months, has been very successful and the site is now supported by the offshore team based in India. TekoPOS has been able to handle sales transaction line volumes of more than 2.650 million a month with weekly and daily variations. Transaction volumes can be as low as 35,000 sales transaction lines a day to as high as 165,000 sales transaction lines a day. The system has absolutely no issues in handling these volumes despite the need to send each sale to the Tax Authority Servers and obtain the docket-level tax from that server
CTQ (Critical to Quality) conditions that TekoPOS had to meet.
- Performance was key with such large transaction Volumes. Cashers at Fiji are very quick in scanning and the processing should be in milliseconds. Customers should not be made to wait for even an extra second.
- Multiple types of promotions should be supported. Fiji is a very competitive market and pricing is very fluid. Flexible pricing options with strong tracking and recording are essential.
- Shift closure for the cashier should be smooth and accurate.
- Secondary Customer side display should be supported. Customers should be able to see the transactions being scanned and the amount and discount to be visible as soon as the item is scanned.
- Pricing changes will be done any time in the day and discounts can be withdrawn after a certain time in the day. Hence all promotions must be capable of being restricted by date and time.
- The application should support gift coupons and loyalty cards.
- The system should be very secure and require authentication for almost any transaction that is not a normal sale.
- As per Fiji Government regulation, every transaction should be sent to the Government portal for tax calculation and come back before the docket is printed for the customer. This should happen instantly when the customer checks out.
At present, Extra Supermarket operates 4 supermarkets and 1 stand-alone bakery. TekoSphere is live and continues to easily meet all the above CTQs. It is running successfully with minimum support from the Tekovai team. TekoPOS can meet and easily handle the volume during the peak Diwali and Christmas festivals where the daily transactions crossed over 165,000 sales transaction lines, without showing any impact on performance.