Case Study - Skiset, leader in online ski rental

Overview

Having sucessfuly grown a large network of franchisees, Skiset was faced with the challenge impacting every player in the industry. The point of sale solution deployed in the network's shops needs to offer high-availability and resilience, while upstreaming their sales data to the headquarter. Management needs them to steer the business using BI tools.

Existing solutions were all based on one of two concepts:

• online first, offering real time communication between terminals, but very degraded features when the network fails
• offline first, resilient in the face of network issues, but causing headache inducing data synchronization issues.

What we did

In the face of a two solutions choice, our job is to find the yet-unthought-of third way, by thinking outside of the box.

We created a proof a concept of a fully distributed Point of Sale solution, that never degrades features more than necessary. For instance, even if a shop connection to the HQ is broken, terminals inside the shop can still communicate with one another, and even with other shops in the same resort if the Metro Area Network is still up. Inventory movements can then still happens while being fully tracked.

Importantly, we chose the right tool for the job: a distributed backend takes care of all the synchronization, getting rid of all issues steming from re-inventing a complex data distribution system.