Derrick Hurley, MD Retailers continue to try to launch engaging and cutting-edge applications to establish themselves at the forefront of omni-channel selling and unified commerce. Ultimately, the idea of a new application design and launch is derailed by archaic platforms, wait times due to resource unavailability, and costly and long-drawn project cycles. Enactor is a new company and product set that leverages a modern approach to expedite the launch of applications that help in addressing evolving consumer needs and boosting in-store, mobile, and online consumer traffic. Enactor’s digital retail platform, developed from the ground up using micro-services, provides highly configurable and out-of-the-box applications that enable omni-channel sales and unified commerce.
“Built using the Enactor Toolset that utilizes a process driven development environment, the applications, and business processes can be quickly and easily extended by Enactor, a certified Enactor partner or by the retailer themselves giving the retailer options to control their destiny,” says Derrick Hurley, Managing Director of Enactor’s US Division. All the tools and applications are under the control of the Enactor Digital Retail Hub, a set of unified central applications that controls and manages the retailer’s customer-facing enterprise. Transactions, orders and customer data are all accessible through this central control suite. Enactor’s Digital Hub facilitates a gamut of activities that include order orchestration, inventory management, CRM, loyalty, and rewards. The platform enables clients to analyze the orders from the stores, manage store level inventory in real-time, and gain inventory updates at the enterprise-level.
Along with the Digital Hub is Enactor Estate manager. This runs in real-time, performs estate communication and device management and can be hosted as a service or run on-premise. It simplifies configurations and manages the deployment of updates, changes, and releases.
Enactor can easily power thousands of POS terminals across multiple retail locations
Estate Manager also removes redundancies in the updating process, as a single update can be applied to all devices such as tablets, traditional POS, kiosks and other store-based systems.
Enactor is a hardware, operating system, and database agnostic platform that underpins traditional POS, mobile tablets and e-commerce sites. The solution is Java based and is a 100 percent service-oriented architecture. Enactor applications, functions and services can be used by retailers from any operating environment. The system runs on Windows, Linux, iOS, and Android and runs on many SQL databases such as Oracle, SQL Server, MySQL, and DB2.
Prior to deploying the Enactor store systems platform and applications, the company undertakes a gap analysis and holds discovery workshops. After zeroing in on the client's requirements, that include any additional features and functional changes, Enactor executes the development process in an agile environment. “Enactor can easily power thousands of POS terminals across multiple retail locations," says Hurley. Enactor's scalability, flexibility, and ease of integration have come to fore in the case of O’Reilly Auto Parts, one of the largest suppliers of auto parts and accessories in the U.S. The supplier with over 4900 stores and 40000 POS terminals sought a product that could adapt to their requirements and size of business. They selected Enactor because of their technology and the Enactor Toolset, which let them extend the functionalities of the platform. O’Reilly utilized the Enactor Toolset to extend the product in-house in order to meet the requirements for both their B2C and B2B customers. The Enactor Toolset and a closely coupled integration, with existing legacy and Java applications, enabled a gradual transition from old to new with minimal risk to business operations.
Enactor’s prowess extends not only to retail but also the hospitality sector. Currently, Harrods Department store in Knightsbridge, London runs over 1,500 POS terminals in a single store, which include 26 restaurants.
