2 page Case Study - Posted 11/11/2007

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Shoprite Group, The

Africa’s Biggest Food Retailer Gains Reliability, Full Network Compliance

How do you keep desktop computers, kiosks, and servers consistent and up-to-date when thousands of them are spread across approximately 1,200 locations in 17 countries? The Shoprite Group, Africa’s leading food retailer, is using Microsoft® System Center Configuration Manager 2007. The software will enable Shoprite to complete what used to be months-long manual updates in a single night, cutting vendor fees significantly and ensuring prompt, full compliance with company standards.

Business Needs

Serving only the freshest foods—from the fruits and vegetables to the meats and baked goods—is just one key to the success of the Shoprite Group, Africa’s largest food retailer, with 1,181 stores in 17 countries across Africa, the Indian Ocean Islands, and southern Asia.

But the technology infrastructure at Shoprite wasn’t always as fresh as the food. Each store operated with anywhere from 5 to 60 Windows®-based computers, ranging from point-of-service (POS) devices to customer kiosks for financial services, and desktop computers and server computers for store management and operations.

The biggest challenge in keeping all those computers up-to-date was bandwidth. With bandwidth in some of the technologically underserved markets in which Shoprite operated costing 10 times as much as comparable service in the United States, the company generally operated with just 64 Kbps to its stores.

“That left us with very narrow batch windows to push software out to the stores,” says Richard Page, IT Project Manager, Shoprite. “We would push the business-critical applications first and get the general updates out afterwards, if we could.”

As a result, mission-critical systems such as the POS devices were updated with operating-system updates only once every couple of months. The third-party file-transfer software used for updates created an open-loop, non-auditable system in which Page and his colleagues could never be sure of which systems were successfully updated, nor of what hardware and software, exactly, was deployed at each store.

When large, critical updates needed to be deployed, a third-party services vendor would deploy the software manually to each machine throughout the enterprise—an expensive and time-consuming process.

The result was that system reliability and availability were affected. Devices could fail because updates had installed improperly or not at all, or because the underlying configuration was non-standard. Helpdesk personnel were hamstrung by not knowing what, exactly, was on the computers they sought to remediate remotely.

Solution

Shoprite is changing that with Microsoft® System Center Configuration Manager 2007. The company is deploying the software to more than 13,000 workstations, servers, and POS devices by February 2008.

The software is organized around four primary System Center Configuration Manager Site servers: one for the stores and one for each of the company’s three operating structures, plus a quality assurance server.

With Configuration Manager, manual updates that used to take as much as six months will be accomplished in less than a week—without having any negative impact on our retail operations. Richard Page IT Project Manager, Shoprite

Shoprite is able to support its large, dispersed environment with relatively few site servers thanks to the new Branch Distribution Point capability of System Center Configuration Manager. It is deploying more than 100 branch distribution points.

With Branch Distribution Points, Shoprite deploys an update once to a computer in a given location, then that computer distributes it to other computers, as appropriate, within its local area network.

The use of Branch Distribution Points eliminates the need to download the update separately over limited bandwidth to each recipient computer, as well as the need to have a dedicated distribution server in each network.

Shoprite is also taking advantage of System Center Configuration Manager Asset Intelligence capabilities to develop an inventory system for hardware and software. Shoprite will monitor asset changes on a daily basis, to quickly catch non-standard machines that may be put into service by distant third-party support providers, to provide up-to-date assessments of which computers need replacing prior to deploying major upgrades or new applications, and to help ensure more accurate software licensing fees.

The company also expects to take advantage of System Center Configuration Manager Maintenance Windows to ensure that large deployments don’t interfere with normal store operations, and it is contemplating the use of Desired Configuration Management to enforce corporate standards.

Benefits

Thanks to Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager, Shoprite will go from updating 10 percent of its infrastructure on a timely basis, with the remaining 90 percent updated on an impromptu basis, if at all, to 100 percent prompt updates throughout the infrastructure, according to Page.

“With Configuration Manager, manual updates that used to take as much as six months will be accomplished in less than a week—without having any negative impact on our retail operations,” says Page.

“We’ll have our first-ever 100 percent compliance and lock-down, which translates into greater reliability and availability, better helpdesk operations, and faster and smoother updates and deployments because we’ll be building on up-to-date, same-state servers, workstations, and devices,” he continues.

Shoprite might have been willing to spend more for faster updates and greater reliability delivered by System Center Configuration Manager but it didn’t have to. Page estimates that System Center Configuration Manager will reduce the need to visit and touch outlying computers and devices by 60 percent.

Costs for third-party update software will also be saved. In all, Shoprite expects over 100 percent return on investment in two years, which Page describes as “a significant payback.”