Pricer Plaza

Pricer Plaza – Future Proof Your ESL Investment with industry leading Cloud Services

A secure, highly scalable cloud-based platform, Pricer Plaza provides all the required services for managing, monitoring, configuring your Pricer systems. It enables a wide range of use cases, as well as flexible APIs to enable the integration and communication with other elements of a smart retail ecosystem. .

Why use Price Plaza?

Rapid Application Integration and Deployment

Applications are being developed that will drive additional capabilities, especially in the areas of consumer engagement, advanced analytics, and business intelligence.

WhyWaste that can be integrated to further increase the effectiveness of chain-wide waste management developments, and Trax’s (Qopius) AI capabilities have been delivered to integrate Pricer’s Shelf Vision and other shelf edge devices.

These applications need to be rapidly and easily integrated with management systems for core in-store platforms such as Pricer Plaza and therefore must be implemented in a cloud-based system

Global, Chain-Wide Deployment

As retailers make decisions at a chain or corporate level (rather than at an individual store level) the ability to deploy, manage and drive immediate decision-making across an entire chain is key to understanding and reacting in a much more timely fashion. This in turn drives consumer engagement and satisfaction meaning greater loyalty, predictability, and flexibility.

Cost Optimization Combined with Real-Time Decision Making

Deploying cloud-based solutions (rather than in-store software) provides direct accountability and cost management benefits as well as enhanced flexibility. The subscription models (see below) can be tailored to specific implementations and feature sets allowing costs to be calculated and attributed with a high degree of accuracy – all while providing real-time decision making across the whole chain, at group, region or individual store level.

What Does Setting Up Pricer Plaza Involve?

Subscription Model

Pricer Plaza uses a subscription model based on size of store, number of daily updates and ESL population. In future this may be extended to include other criteria. Additional services are also available and are described in a separate services document. This model simplifies the understanding of the costs associated with these applications, enables the possibility to tailor the systems to your needs and provides the capability for advanced analytics, management and reporting to a far greater degree than more limited in-store management system capabilities.

Architecture

Pricer Plaza is hosted on a cloud platform that hosts a set of physical assets, such as computers and hard disk drives, and virtual resources, such as virtual machines (VMs). The system uses a Kubernetes based architecture to enable automated deployment, massive scaling, and management. These resources are contained in highly secure cloud platform data centers around the globe. Each data center location is in a region. Regions are available in Asia, Australia, Europe, North America, and South America. Each region is a collection of three zones, which are isolated from each other within the region. This distribution of resources provides several benefits, including redundancy in case of failure and reduced latency by locating resources closer to clients. This in turn enables compliance with local privacy and hosting regulations and privacy laws such as location of user data to be held in a specific region such as the EU or US. This distribution also introduces some rules about how resources can be used together.

This architecture is therefore capable of delivering the highest possible availability, performance, and data security (incl. disaster recovery) demanded for any business-critical system.

Features and Benefits

Chain Management

Pricer Plaza Chain Management service enables management a multitude of stores across multiple chains and geographies right down to managing an individual store. This is made easy and efficient through centralized management of the following capabilities:

▪ Group, collect and manage all stores in an organization. Manage them through a single administrator console

▪ Set up stores and locations, manage label pricing, and track store activity across the entire retail chain

▪ Grouping stores and maintaining common configuration for these groups

▪ Monitoring of all relevant functions within the connected stores

In-Store Functions

Pricer Plaza store functions are driven by nodes that automatically scale on demand and reliably manage hundreds of thousands of price changes, item data and price tags.

▪ Link and Unlink Electronic Shelf Labels

▪ Flashing Electronic Shelf Labels

▪ Label Design Tool

▪ Item Configuration

▪ Reports

▪ Search

▪ Store System Status

▪ Infrastructure Management

▪ Logging and Alert Management

▪ PDA and App UI and Management

▪ Job Scheduling

Further Expansion

Customer and Partner Integration

Pricer is committed to provide advanced solutions such as dynamic price management, waste management, advanced shelf vision monitoring and analysis and additional solutions

Integration with Pricer Plaza is made simple by using a series of public APIs (Application Program Interface). All Pricer Plaza Public API’s are published on Pricer REST API Documentation site (please refer to the documentation site for detailed description of each available API)

Pricer Responsibility and Deliverables

Pricer’s core development goal is to continuously adopt modern software development practices that allow the development and support teams to work efficiently in a modern cloud-native technology landscape. This includes some additional mechanisms that aim to enable teams to manage their solutions in accordance with the DevOps philosophy to deliver the services listed below.

▪ Maximum Availability

DevOps team makes sure the system runs 24/7. Support services offered to customers separately.

▪ Environment management

Working with continuous improvement and changes to the environment(s).

▪ Multi-tenant management

Base configuration and setting up customer environment.

Managing auto scaling limits of environment in line with customer growth and needs.

Providing billing and usage information to customer.

▪ Application management

Updating software, developing new features

▪ Data maintenance

Making backups to make sure scaling and performance is optimal.

▪ Monitoring

System and security monitoring.

▪ Disaster recovery

Plans, tests and performs actions if the worst would happen.

▪ Level 3 technical response

Technical expertise supporting internal and external qualified users