A.S. Watson Group adopts Wincor Nixdorf’s Managed Services solution

The A.S. Watson Group (ASW), a retailer with one of the world's largest portfolio of retail formats, has awarded Wincor Nixdorf a contract to provide hardware parts and on-site maintenance, software maintenance support and helpdesk services across Asia Pacific. 
The Managed Services deal is designed to allow ASW to attain standardization of services and processes, and centralise reporting and management cost effectively.
More than 900 stores will be managed in four countries in Asia Pacific. Wincor Nixdorf will monitor and provide maintenance for ASW’s point-of-sale (POS) devices, store back office servers, store networks, handheld terminals as well as other ancillary devices. Wincor Nixdorf is the exclusive provider of POS systems to ASW in Asia Pacific and across the globe. 
With this integrated solution – comprising existing Product Related Services and Managed Services – ASW’s entire store ICT infrastructure in China, Malaysia, Singapore and Thailand will be managed from a single source, as will all service callouts.
“Our goal in working with Wincor Nixdorf is to continuously improve store operational efficiency through the standardization of software, hardware and procedures,” said Samuel Poon, Head of Store Systems (Asia), Group IT, ASW. “We are working to identify trends and root causes of common problems to assist staff to resolve issues quickly and to reduce the overall number of support calls,” he added. 
  
Real-time proactive monitoring including prompt problem reports and remote management will take place 24/7. In addition, the system servers, POS software and operation will be monitored and tracked centrally. The contract also covers hardware and software monitoring of third-party products
“Wincor Nixdorf is in a strong position to reduce the number of calls to the helpdesk as we provide proactive monitoring of store ICT equipment to pre-emptively reduce calls and downtime of hardware as part of our end-to-end  incident management process,” said David Tay, Regional Director, Wincor Nixdorf’s Technical Solutions/CIO Services Division, Asia Pacific.
In order to maximise availability of systems and reduce calls to the helpdesk, Wincor Nixdorf also supplies knowledge sharing via a global knowledge base. This helps to solve common issues or problems in the region, substantially reducing call end-to-end resolution time. 
ASW is an international retail and manufacturing business with operations in 34 markets worldwide. The group operates more than 8,600 retail stores running the gamut from health & beauty, luxury perfumeries & cosmetics to food, electronics, fine wine and airport retail arms.