Solution overview

Engaged Commerce®

2

Extensibility:

— Our solution is extremely configurable and enables very strong extensibility for existing services, UI (mobile and POS), devices, and data.

Reliability:

— By allowing each POS device to maintain a complete offline cache of all necessary information needed to trade when a server is not available, we can ensure that all stores remain operational 100% of the time.

Maintainability:

— Our solution provides robust maintainability for all touchpoints, microservices (in-store and in the cloud), and the platform.

Deployment flexibility:

— Our solution can be deployed in a variety of topologies, including multi-tier, single-tier (central server) and single-tier (store server). Because individual lanes can be configured as resilient touch-points, they are not dependent on any server availability to continue trading with full capabilities.

Client flexibility (where shopping occurs; who is doing the work; the specific task):

— Since our solution is decoupled, we can isolate various business services from the user interface, allowing us to change the look and feel of the interface to best suit the specific user of the application (associate, customer, etc.). A good example of this is our native Self-Checkout client, which provides a different user interface and workflows, while using the same application as our associate-driven POS.

— Additionally, this decoupling allows us to re-use the same services and capabilities found on a traditional POS on thin devices by deploying the services on an in-store or

PCMS’ VISION Commerce Suite (VCS) is a broad platform of unified commerce solutions designed to serve all retail verticals, in any format and in any geographic location. As a proven offering that is deployed across the globe in over 50 countries and more than 300,000 selling points, we understand the needs of retailers today.

Retailers face a complicated set of business and technology challenges, especially when their online and digital channels fail to connect with physical stores. VCS solves many challenges by forging a consistent integration between online, digital and physical stores. Here are a few business problems we are solving today to help retailers stay ‘fit’ for the future:

Evolutionary:

— PCMS has continued to evolve the system, strengthening our capabilities and adding new innovations as technology and the industry has evolved. This approach ensures our customer’s technology helps them stay relevant in the competitive world of retail.

Solution durability:

— PCMS has been making the right technology choices for over twenty years. We were one of the leaders in adopting Java in retail and played a major part in developing key API frameworks, such as JavaPOS, that was necessary to establish the technology. We have evolved the solution to a full enterprise commerce platform.

Decoupled:

— Our basic design pattern is highly component based.

VISION Commerce SuiteWhat business problem are you trying to solve?

3

cloud-based server and limiting the local code to UI and peripheral management. When coupled with a middle-ware agent, such as Apache’s Cordova. This is extended even further to allow the same client code to work on iOS, Android, or Windows Mobile devices, providing more options to the shopper while enabling a consistent user experience, regardless of when and how they shop.

Scalability:

— The system is built on a modern RESTful SOA-based component model architecture where services can be used anywhere from POS to mobile to eCommerce. It provides a high-level of vertical and horizontal scalability and is deployed with some of the largest global retailers.

Response time:

— For traditional POS footprints, our target response time to an item scan is 250ms. This will be on our minimum configuration of 2GHz CPU with 1GB RAM. Our recommended store server config supporting 200 thin devices would be a quad-core CPU with 32GB RAM. This would deliver response times within 250ms for all key mobile operations.

Shared services:

— Business logic can run embedded on the POS (for resilience) and on the server (cloud/server/data center) facilitating thin client mobile devices, while supporting consistent business logic calculation and data. Customers can write their own front-end applications to utilize the SOA components.

Shared common ‘basket’, regardless of the shopping channel:

— A single basket, promotion, price, taxation and payment engine that can be used across all channels for complete consistency and accuracy

— A shared basket, promotion, price and tax engine that can be used with retailer developed in-house systems and other vendor solutions

Solutions enabling retailers to sell from anywhere:

— Fixed point of sale registers on counters or checkouts

— Registers that convert to a sell service device at the click of a button

— Customer Self-Scan and checkout at a kiosk

— Mobile solutions for associate enablement with mobile POS or range extension, to sell products held in another location

— Consumer downloadable apps, enabling the customer to ‘scan, pay, and go’ from their own smartphone

— The ability to process a transaction and not reply on a network is a huge relief for retailers. This supports modern mobile devices for the use of smartphones and tablets, which facilitates associate enablement dependant on Wi-Fi for their operation, while still operating in a fully ‘resilient’ manner.

Designed for performance:

— International capability for language, currency, taxation, card payment and fiscal requirements for retailers with operations in multiple countries

— Agnostic technology that works across multiple operating systems, hardware and mobile devices, without locking the retailer into one platform or another. Also, supports many legacy hardware platforms and technologies.

— they can purchase the same item online, and get it delivered by the next day. Most importantly, the customer wants the comfort of returning a product with ease, through whatever channel is convenient.

4

Extensive functional breadth

VCS offers extensive capability for multiple devices, whether a fixed POS register, Kiosk, Self-Checkout or on a Mobile device. The solution includes a consumer-based mobile app where customers can scan, pay, and go using their own mobile device as a quick method of registering products, viewing applicable promotions and then finalizing by making payment and exit for checking out.

Multiple device formats & profiles

VCS offers support for virtually any device with a wide-ranging user interface capability across differing form factors supported through ‘personality’ profiles.

Multiple Point of Sale UX profiles

Extensive multi-format capability with integration to central systems:

Any format, in-store

5

Consumer ‘Bring your own device’ (BYOD) app Associate mobile POS app

Self-Scan checkout & Convertible Lane

PCMS is investing heavily in its own Self-Scan Checkout-Lite and Convertible Lane technology. For retailers wishing to move toward a simple, card only EMV checkout, this offers a cost-effective method to offer Self-Checkout, compared with traditional solutions in the market.

Our Convertible Lane solution is based on our POS platform where the register can be used by the sales associate as normal, but the additional lane or register can we ‘switched’ over by the sales associate to be a customer-facing device and used for Self-Scan.

When the switchover is activated, the software invokes a completely different user interface personality called ‘Self-Checkout’, but the actual application is the same–only the user interface changes. The screen and printer are fixed to a movable arm so the screen, printer and EMV device can me moved and locked into a customer-facing position.

This uses the same peripherals as the POS register, while offering significant operational flexibility for the retailer, at a minimal cost in hardware.

Additionally, the VCS solution integrates with industry-leading, full service, self-checkout solutions provided by hardware manufacturers such as NCR FastLane, Fujitsu USCAN, Toshiba, and Diebold-Nixdorf.

6

Back Office capabilities

Cash Management

— Rich capabilities for managing cash reconciliation in the store across all selling devices with lane, operator or session accountability

— Management and reconciliation of multiple store safes including POS change allocations and banking collections

Dashboard Reporting

— Reporting capabilities include low level item, department and sales reporting as well as high-level, dashboard driven, KPI reporting

Stock & Inventory Management

— Real-time stock for stores with full inventory management

— Manual and algorithm-based suggested ordering

— Stock adjustments, deliveries, waste management and transfers

— Wet stock management for food and beverage products

— Mobile device-based stock management utilities

— Single view of stock with visibility across all physical stores and access to stock in other locations

— Click & Collect controls to bring digital and physical channels together

Shelf Edge Labelling

— In-store paper-based shelf edge label production

— Integration to electronic shelf edge label solutions

7

Architected for agility

A centralized and highly-scalable back-end infrastructure, deployable in the cloud or on premise

— Our central system is a set of Java-based server applications that together provide all the central functions and infrastructure necessary to support a complete retail estate. Deployment of these applications is via a compatible J2EE application ‘container’ such as IBM WebSphere. Enterprise container platforms (e.g. Docker) are used to provide another level of scalability.

A complete retail services suite comprising of a rich set of Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) RESTful micro-services

— At the core of VISION Commerce Suite is a comprehensive set of re-usable services representing a SOA (Services Orientated Architecture) approach to providing retail transactional functionality. To ensure the maximum degree of openness, these services utilize industry standard XML payloads wrapped within RESTful web-services

— This delivers high levels of consistent functionality to any channel from fixed location POS registers, to kiosks, mobile devices and centralised channels such as eCommerce and social store fronts

Highly flexible integration capabilities, including mixing of PCMS and external elements in the sales journey

— In addition to the retail micro-services within VISION OnDemand, there is also a rich integration layer in the form of VISION Channel Manager (VCM). VCM is an implementation of a micro-services broker, providing a lightweight and retail-specific platform for service orchestration and data transformation.

Rich client (off-line capable) and thin client POS options

— Our rich client POS is built in Java and includes a POS-specific framework. This framework uses industry-standard patterns such as MVC, Finite State Machines, XML configuration and component-based architecture. It can be deployed on Windows or Linux.

— Our thin client POS is built using a modern JavaScript/HTML5 using an Angular/Ionic/Cordova framework that enables the solution to run on any device. The app can run either within a browser, or wrapped as an app targeted at iOS, Android, or Windows. The application uses the micro-services back-end to perform its business logic.

Highly extensible and customizable application capabilities - this can be broken down into four distinct areas:

— Data & XML Interfaces

— Rich client POS application

— Thin client mobile applications

— Back-end services with ability to fulfil service requests from existing 3rd party applications/systems

Centralized and enterprise-focused view of data

— These consist of several enterprise-class, centralized data stores that hold all the required data to run the applications. This ranges from centralized price, produce, promotion and other ‘reference data’ through to basket and transaction data.

— This architecture is not only innovative, but it is proven at significant scale with some of the world’s largest tier-1 retailers.

8

Headless CommerceVCS is undergoing a technology refresh over the last few years to underpin all applications with stateless SOA driven micro-services, turning the platform into a true ‘Headless Commerce’ platform for retail.

Much of the rich functionality based in the POS application has been re-implemented as SOA stateless micro-services such that they can be run anywhere and made available to non PCMS systems such as retailers eCommerce solution for basket and promotion pricing.

Resilience and thin client are both imperatives

While digital and eCommerce worlds are playing a bigger part in retail, PCMS recognizes the store is still very important and in parallel, resiliency is imperative. Being able to make the sale, transact and take the money from the customer without the need to rely on online cloud-based availability is a ‘must have’ for any retailer who operates a volume-based retail operation such as grocery or fast-moving consumer goods.

Our policy over the last few years is to develop everything as ‘on-demand micro-services’ so that no matter what function is initially needed (for example, POS, Kiosk or mobile device) it can be used anywhere—now or in the future.

9

The PCMS journey & roadmap

As a leader in retail technology, we are continually investing in our solutions in order to respond to new technological trends, to keep the product fresh and the class-leading solution it is today. PCMS has strong experience and success through innovative, agile ways of working with retailers to deliver leading edge projects through strong collaborative development and delivery of our roadmap.

Our strategy is evolution not revolution, providing our customers with a best in class solution today with a roadmap of continued innovation, never leaving any of our customers behind. We continue to refine a single, enterprise commerce platform and accommodate the increasing cross channel user scenarios and ad

PCMS has been working to the SOA stateless micro-services strategy since 2011 and increasing our services footprint while still maintaining a functional rich and stable solution across our customer base. The strategic plan is to develop further capabilities as follows:

Headless commerce

— Build out an even richer set of micro-services that can be used with any system

— Create a catalogue of pre-built partner plug-ins for industry leading 3rd party solutions for Order Management, CRM and eCommerce

— Create easy-to-use API capability for 3rd parties and retailers to ‘call’ the micro-services and partner plug-ins

Harmonize the user interface

— Implement the Angular style user interface technology as used on mobile applications into the POS, to bring the user experience in-line

— Implement the auto-scaling capability as used in mobile within the POS framework

Reengineer the remaining POS business logic into services

— Complete the business logic transformation to micro-services for all relevant retail functions to be shared between the resilient POS and thin client devices

PCMS has been working to the SOA stateless micro-services strategy since 2011 and increasing our services footprint while still maintaining a functional rich and stable solution across our customer base. The strategic plan is to develop further capabilities as follows:

10

Our mobile POS offering is built on top of the rich micro-services that under-pin our platform. PCMS has been on an exciting journey of service enablement for several years now unlocking the business logic stored in client applications, such as the fixed POS to provide the same uniform omni-channel selling capabilities across several device endpoints.

Significant effort is currently being invested to drive a convergence in our fixed/mobile POS technology stacks to fully complete our service enablement.

Key benefits of our fixed/mobile POS technology convergence are: — A common look and feel across all selling channels by utilizing our

flexible mobile user interface technology within our fixed POS solution

— Full service enablement of all POS and Engaged Commerce functions to provide a unified set of services with a single view of the customer at their core enabling true personalization of all customer interaction, regardless of the customer journey, with the platform

— Building a sales-focused ‘Associate Enablement’ application that is targeted firmly at the “mixed basket” sale. This provides a blend of customer profiling, presentation of rich product data, building complex orders with delivery and shipping elements, and taking payment in a single transaction for items being taken away and items being ordered for home delivery or collection later

11

Summary PCMS has great experience in developing close-knit relationships with all of our retail partners through our collaborative approach to client projects and the evolution of our product suite. The VISION Commerce Suite is constantly evolving to exceed the needs of our client partnerships and the rapidly changing retail marketplace through self-funded R&D efforts, strategic partnerships with technology companies, collaborative projects with clients, and relationships with our global distributors.

Our overriding business rationale is to provide retailers with the following capability:

— Sell from Anywhere – Point of Sale (POS), kiosk, self-service, mobile, web

— Surprise & Delight Consumers – Personalized Offers at the point of transaction

— Never Lose a Sale – In-store and digital touchpoints enable a truly unified commerce journey

— Invisible Infrastructure – Scalable reliability that’s easy to support

— Affordable – VCS is efficient, resilient and fast, allowing retailers to be nimble and enable a lower total cost of ownership

Get in touch

We love hearing from new people. If you’re interested in a partnership, project or career with PCMS, please reach out to us:

Europe

PCMS Group Limited PCMS House, Torwood Close Westwood Business Park Coventry CV4 8HX

024 7669 4455

mail@pcmsgroup.com

Americas

PCMS 4270 Glendale Milford Road Cincinnati, OH 45242

513 587 3100

info@pcmsdatafit.com

linkedin.com/company/pcms-datafit

@PCMSGroup

youtube.com/user/ThePCMSGroup

@PCMSGroup

pcmsdatafit.com

Copyright © 2019 PCMS Group Ltd. All rights reserved.