McKeever Enterprises, Inc. owns and operates 12 supermarkets located in the Kansas City metropolitan area. In operation for nearly 50 years, the company employs around 1,200 people.
QVS Software, based in Raleigh, North Carolina, offers the point of sales (POS) software solution that McKeever Enterprises uses in its supermarkets. This software stores pricing information and manages sales transactions.
Driven by visionary executives looking to enhance the grocery shopping experience, McKeever Enterprises proactively consulted with Amazon to discuss implementing Dash Cart technology in several of its supermarkets.
Dash Cart technology by Amazon is a smart shopping cart system that gives customers the ability to quickly and efficiently add, remove, and weigh items in their cart while shopping. Customers can then pay through an automatic process, allowing them to skip the checkout line.
Previously available only in Amazon Fresh and Whole Foods (a subsidiary of Amazon) locations, Dash Cart is now available to third party retailers.
Challenge
The team at McKeever Enterprises had the vision to adopt the emerging smart shopping cart technology. Yet the company’s software architecture presented an infrastructural challenge.
Dash Cart technology by Amazon is built to sync with a retailer’s existing POS software, with one caveat. In order to sync, the POS software must be deployed in Amazon Web Services (AWS). For stores owned by Amazon, this is not an issue, since these stores utilize POS software housed in AWS.
However, there are many POS software solutions, including the QVS Software solution implemented in McKeever Enterprises supermarkets, that are not deployed in AWS. Discovering this roadblock, the team at McKeever Enterprises had three choices: let go of the vision of bringing Dash Cart to its stores; break its contract with QVS Software and find a new POS solution already embedded in AWS; or find a solution allowing Dash Cart to work with its current software.
The team at QVS Software was eager to develop a solution to sync its software with AWS, thus implementing the Dash Cart technology while retaining McKeever Enterprises as a customer.
“We wanted to adopt the smart cart technology,” says Tim Cosens, Chief Information Officer (CIO) at McKeever Enterprises. “We didn’t want the technology piece to stop us from implementing Dash Cart. We needed a solution, which is exactly what Trek10 and QVS Software were able to provide.”
Click here to see how McKeever and Trek10 worked together for a solution.