Retail IT for Stores, Restaurants and Hospitality Estates

Customer Engagement Solutions for Retailers

Technology Across a Store Estate

Trybus Solutions works with retailers, restaurant groups and hospitality operators on the technology that runs the sites. That covers wired and wireless networks, the connectivity into each location, communications and contact center, security and segmentation around payment systems, cloud and back-office infrastructure, the devices staff use on the floor, and support.

The trigger is nearly always operational, and it is nearly always at store level. A platform is coming up on end of support. A payment or point-of-sale change is forcing a change to the network underneath it. An acquirer questionnaire has produced findings with dates attached. A brand refresh is putting new sites through a fit-out. Or a broadband contract covering every location renews at once.

Most of our retail clients run a small central IT team against a large number of sites. We are there for the parts that need people who have deployed to several hundred locations before, and for work that has to finish inside a window somebody else set. This page is about the environment; the service pages below describe the work.

What Is Different About Retail

01

Sites With Nobody Technical On Them

The person on the ground is a shift manager with a queue at the counter. Everything the design depends on has to survive that: equipment that configures itself when it is plugged in, a way into the site when the main link is down, and labeling somebody can read out over the phone. Where a step genuinely needs an engineer, it is planned and priced as a visit.

02

Payment Systems and the Rest of the Building

PCI DSS applies to entities that store, process or transmit cardholder data, and also to anything that could affect the security of the cardholder data environment. That second half is what quietly widens scope. Most of the design work is deciding what payment traffic is permitted to touch, then keeping guest wireless, the back office and the connected equipment on the sales floor outside that boundary.

The Freeze Nobody Negotiates

Retail and hospitality run to a trading calendar, and most operators stop change well before their peak. Whatever is not finished and settled by the freeze date waits until the season is over, which turns a twelve month plan into a much shorter working year. We schedule backwards from the freeze instead of forwards from a kickoff, and would rather defer a phase than begin it as the window closes.

03
04

A Rollout Is a Kit, Not a Project Per Site

Two hundred sites cannot be designed two hundred times. The work is producing a small number of standard builds by site format, proving them on a handful of real locations that are honestly representative, and turning the remainder into a repeatable install. Pre-staged equipment, a parts list, an install guide written for the person opening the boxes, and a remote turn-up. Exceptions are handled as exceptions.

05

Guest and Corporate Traffic in One Building

Customer wireless, staff devices, payment terminals, the back office and whatever marketing installed last year all share one modest link into the site. Guest access needs its own path, a ceiling on what it can consume, and no route into anything else. The awkward part is rarely the guest network itself. It is the things quietly attached to it because that was the easiest port to reach.

06

Back of House Nobody Lists Until It Breaks

Scales and label printers, signage players, timeclocks, cameras and recorders, drive-thru order posts and headsets, overhead paging and music feeds, kitchen displays, kiosks and building controls. Much of it was installed by somebody else, is supported by somebody else, and appears on no inventory anyone holds. We find it during discovery, because it is the most common reason a site cutover stops short of finished.

Technology We Work With

We hold partner relationships across the technology industry, and our engineers also work in platforms we do not sell. A retail project starts on whatever is in the stores now, whoever supplied it, including the back-of-house equipment nobody put on the inventory.

We do not publish comparisons between manufacturers. Which platform suits an organization is something an assessment works out, not something a website should decide.

See all technology partners →

What Constrains a Retail IT Team

A retail IT team usually knows exactly what the estate needs. What it does not have is window, short of people who can be in more than one place at once, and wary of any line item that multiplies by the number of sites.

How We Work With Retail and Hospitality Operators

Seven service lines. A retail program usually draws on several of them at once.