Here’s new functionality across the Infinity platform that will help you and your team reduce operational complexity and create a differentiated omnichannel customer experience.
Infinity is a modular platform and you may need additional components or licensing to access some functionality.
INFINITY API
Send event messaging via Azure Service Bus
The Infinity Cloud Events Service can now publish events over Azure Service Bus as well as via RabbitMQ. If you are consolidating on Azure, this lets you retire your RabbitMQ infrastructure without changing what your downstream systems receive.
See your API activity in Kibana without RabbitMQ
The POS Users, Quotes, Sales Orders and Address APIs, along with the Infinity API Database Service, now log directly to ElasticSearch, so their activity reaches your Kibana dashboards without RabbitMQ in the path. Each service also reports its own name and version in its log entries, so you can tell at a glance which component produced which message.
Query and reserve incoming stock
A new Available to Promise API lets your systems ask what stock is already on order and due in and hold some of it against a customer order. You can check availability for several product and branch combinations at once, create or cancel reservations in a single batch, read back what has been pre-allocated against a purchase order, and update a purchase order line’s expected arrival date. DC stock levels can be synced incrementally on a schedule you set and fully reconciled once a day.
Reconcile individual payments rather than whole transactions
The Sales Orders and Invoices APIs now return a tender identifier and a unique payment identifier on every payment line, so you can reconcile individual payments rather than whole transactions. Order and invoice lines for kitset products now return their component breakdown as well, so downstream systems can see what is in the kit without a second lookup.
Track customer order changes as they happen
The Infinity Cloud Events Service now publishes an event whenever a customer order changes, not only when it is first created. The payload carries the full current state of the order plus flags showing exactly what moved, so a downstream system can act on the change without comparing versions.
INVENTORY
Leverage enhanced customer ordering and purchase ordering
Infinity can now run a full promotions, customer ordering and purchasing workflow, without you having to come up with manual workarounds to match customer orders to POs. Our new feature, which allows the same item to appear multiple times on a PO, means there’s a one-to-one link between each customer order line and its corresponding PO line, making Infinity a great option for retailers whose customer orders contain split-pricing promotional deals.
And because this feature is also built into our Purchase Order and Stock Receipts APIs, you can use it to integrate to third-party platforms as well for even greater flexibility.
Save time and cost when updating labels
Updating your physical shelf labels can be a drain on your store staff’s time as they walk the retail floor trying to find each product’s location or else manually sort and group labels before they start the update. When there are pages of labels to be dealt with, the inefficiencies are obvious and costly.
Infinity now speeds up what until now has been an onerous task by letting you sort and separate labels into useful groups, such as department and subdepartment, instead of just by UPC, so your store team can organise the update in a way that makes sense for the store, while also reducing the chance of a label being missed or applied to the wrong product.
PRODUCT INFORMATION MANAGEMENT
Empower stores to manage stock wind-downs locally
You can now give your stores more control over when to wind down end-of-life stock ordering without fully deranging an item, allowing them to sell through existing stock and process refunds while blocking any new replenishment.
Until now, the ability to flag an item as ‘do not order’ has sat with the head office only. By fully managing this aspect of item maintenance locally, stores can reduce the waste associated with unintended purchase orders and eliminate the manual overhead of having to reset the flag if it has been overwritten by head office.
Easily create links between parent and component items
We’ve simplified the way you can create links between component items that need to be sold together. Using our redesigned options and links tool, you can identify a parent stock item and then easily add the components to it so they can be sold as a single item at the POS. So, for example, if you sell furniture or homewares, you can set up a dining suite comprising a table and multiple chairs as an item with its own price, while also keeping the option to sell all the components separately.
ORDER MANAGEMENT
Automate store-to-DC fulfilment
You can now use our advanced customer orders module to automate and speed up fulfilment of order lines involving store-to-DC fulfilment, where the stock is sourced from a store and dispatched to the DC. Transfer requests are sent automatically from the store to the DC for these lines, saving your team the hassle of creating them manually.
Track stock that is available to promise to customers
Making sure you have enough stock to fulfil orders is fundamental to meeting customers’ service expectations. Infinity gets you a step closer to delivering on those expectations by letting your store team track stock that is available to promise. They can see incoming quantities on outstanding purchase orders so they can confidently commit stock to customers before it physically arrives and give the customers realistic delivery dates.
For more about how this feature can work in your business, see the Available to Promise API item further up.
CUSTOMER AND LOYALTY
Send statements to customers with no balance outstanding
We’ve made it easier for you to communicate with your debtor customers now that you can send them statements when they’ve fully paid off their balance owing. This only applies to payments that have been made in the previous 90 days, so you won’t send statements to dormant customers.
PRICING AND PROMOTIONS
Reward customers with spend-threshold promotions
We’re giving you even more ways to recognise and reward your customers using our advanced pricing module. Our new Total Sale Rewards feature lets you create spend-threshold promotions that allow stores to move clearance or slow-selling stock while simultaneously driving higher customer basket values.
Rather than discounting a product outright, you can set a threshold at which the special kicks in. So, for example, you can offer customers a $10 item when they spend more than $50, meaning you’re rewarding a higher spend and creating an incentive to trade up, without eroding margin on the full range.
POINT OF SALE
Use Club+ with Infinity POS
Infinity now integrates with the Club+, one of New Zealand’s most popular and widely used loyalty programmes. Customers can see their Club+ balance, earn points when they buy qualifying items and redeem those points using a PIN.
Expedite age verification at the point of sale
Our advanced age check module gives you a comprehensive way to check customers’ ages and prevent illegal sales at the POS. We’ve now made it easier to process mixed-basket transactions where some items such as alcohol are restricted and others aren’t, and transactions that contain no restricted items at all, meaning less friction for cashiers and speedier service for customers.
You can now also decide whether to trigger the age verification check when the customer comes to pay or when items are first added to the sale.
To find out more about any of these enhancements and add them to your Infinity platform, contact us.
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Infinity unified commerce is powered by Triquestra, an Auckland-based retail software company.
