IKEA, the world's largest
home-furnishing retailer, opened its doors in Malaysia
in August 2003. Featuring 35,811 m2 of floor space
(roughly the size of 5 football fields) with over 7,000
home furnishing products displayed in 54 settings, IKEA
is the largest furnishing store in South East Asia. Just
six weeks before its grand opening, IKEA was still
lacking the credit card payment facilities necessary for
operations. IKEA turned to GHL Systems to provide the
solution.
The new IKEA store was located in
Mutiara Damansara , a fairly new development area - the
telecommunications infrastructure was still being
developed. There was a need to establish communications
in the form of a leased to the Bank to carry the payment
transactions. Due to the various challenges posed by the
tight deadline and the general availability of
infrastructure, the leased line to the bank was not
going to be ready by the time the store was to be
launched! There had to be a way to connect to the bank
quickly, with a high bandwidth
In addition to the external
communications infrastructure, the in-store
infrastructure had to be prepared as well. IKEA had 36
checkout counters on the lower floor of the store - they
wanted to be able to accept The EDC terminals were to be
linked in a local area network to the transaction
concentrator which would then send the transactions
along the permanant connection to the bank for
processing. But the wiring in place was put in by the
previous vendor and geared towards their system. Was
there a way to reuse the existing wiring, or did GHL
have to rewire the entire premise again?
GHL proposed to use the Verifone Omni
3750 terminals that supported the use of the RS485
serial protocol for transport. This allowed them to
re-use the existing wiring that was already in place for
the previous vendor's system. The RS485 protocol also
gave them the additional benefit of a double-loop
configuration that catered for a fully redundant
network. Normally, in a serial linkup of terminals, if
there is a disruption to one of the nodes of the link,
the rest of the terminals after that node would not be
able to communicate on the LAN. However, using a
double-loop configuration, if one side of the loop is
broken, the secondary loop will ensure that the other
nodes will be able to communicate with the concentrator. The configuration consisted of two units of the
NetAccess L1000 concentrator with 3 RS485 loops,
configured in a redundant loop configuration - to serve
the 36 EDC terminals on the checkout lane.
The communications dilemma was
resolved by using ISDN dialup. ISDN dialup is the main
method of backup for digital leased lines - most routers
cater for the ISDN backup feature. The routers were
configured as if the main line was down, and the ISDN
dialup link was setup and tested.
As added insurance, GHL decided to
implement a new feature built into the NetAccess L1000
concentrator box - a backup connection that would
connect to the bank via GPRS.
The store was fully connected and
ready to roll come August 14th 2003, the official
opening date of IKEA Damansara. A record of 39,000
people visited the store on opening day with customers
lining up outside the store as early as 6 am to catch
the early bird specials on offer. And then, disaster
struck! The ISDN dialup failed to connect just 30
minutes before store opening and the leased line was not
due to ready for operations for another month.
Fortunately, the GPRS backup was able to swing into
action with 10 minutes to spare.
Within the first two days, an
impressive total of RM 1.2 Million was transacted over
this GPRS link. Eventually the ISDN and leased lines
connectivity was restored and has continued operations
till today.
GHL was able to reuse the existing
wiring structure and expand the usability of the
structure itself using technologies built by GHL - the
ESLP protocol and RS485 serial wiring - to build a
highly available network for the EDC terminals in IKEA.
Then leveraging on existing mature technologies such as
ISDN backup dialing to routers, IKEA was connected to
the bank even without the benefit of leased lines. The
leased line was finally connected about 6 months after
the IKEA opening . Also of note is GHL's use of emerging
technologies (ie GPRS) to extend the functionality of
the system to provide a backup connectivity to the bank
while both ISDN and the leased lines were down.
IKEA was only the first client in
Malaysia to implement this system. In the following
months, GHL expanded the system to IKANO Power Centre,
the shopping mall adjoining IKEA and also implemented an
expanded system (12 NAL1000s) in Berjaya Times Square at
that time the largest mall building in Malaysia.
References in this publication to GHL Systems Berhad’s products or services do not imply that GHL Systems Berhad intends to make them available in all countries in which GHL Systems Berhad operates.
This document is based on information provided by IKEA and illustrates how one organization uses GHL Systems Berhad products. Many factors have contributed to the results and benefits described; GHL Systems Berhad does not guarantee comparable results elsewhere.
