/ CASE STUDY · RETAIL
Cadence Retail: 340 stores, one immovable deadline
Every point-of-sale terminal had to be off the legacy platform before Black Friday, or the whole thing waited another year.
3,100 seats
340 stores
7 months
Delivered 3 weeks early
Engagement facts
Engagement facts
A platform going end-of-life in the worst possible month.
Cadence ran their point-of-sale estate on a hosted platform whose vendor had announced end of support for the following January. Renewing was not an option and neither was migrating during the trading peak, which for them starts in the second week of November and does not end until January.
The estate itself was the smaller half of the problem. Each store had accumulated local workarounds: receipt printers driven by a script on the back-office PC, a loyalty integration that only worked on one till per store, gift-card balances held in a database nobody had permission to touch. Any migration that assumed the stores were identical would have failed in the first wave.
We ran a store-by-store profile instead of a template rollout, which cost three extra weeks up front and saved an estimated eleven at the back end.
Measured against their own baseline
How the seven months ran
Mar – Apr
Store profiling
All 340 stores surveyed remotely, 22 visited in person.
May
Reference build
Four archetype builds covering 97% of the estate.
Jun
Pilot, 12 stores
Two full trading weekends before sign-off.
Jul – Sep
Main rollout
30 stores a week, Tuesday to Thursday only.
Oct
Complete, 3 weeks early
Legacy platform decommissioned before peak.
They told us in March that store profiling would cost us three weeks we did not think we had. They were right, and we finished in October instead of December.
