Landmark

Infinity simplifies POS for complex agribusiness

Landmark is an agribusiness leader in Australia, operating a large retail presence, multiple agency business streams, and a live export operation.

It is part of the Agrium Group, a Canadian publicly listed company with interest in fertilizer, technology, and rural retail. Agrium is the largest rural retailer in the world with over 1000 sites, predominantly in North America.

The retail component of the business is where Infinity provides a POS solution. The company’s extensive network of over 200 retail branches spans the length and breadth of the Australian continent, and employs over 1000 people. Merchandise includes crop protection, seed, animal health and management, fencing and other general farming products, with most stores having one or two Infinity POS terminals, and several having as many as ten.

A simple POS solution for a complex business

The retail side of Landmark’s business works alongside the agency business streams covering real estate, livestock sales, wool sales, financial services and insurance.

Yet while the business explores many complex paths, there is some relief in the simplicity of the retail stream.

Infinity POS was implemented in 2010 to capture the sale of fertiliser and merchandise products across the branch locations. Infinity supports unique aspects of the business, such as remote authorisation for authority overrides, dangerous good compliance, rules based pricing, and local and agency exclusions.

Infinity POS is intuitive, useable, highly stable, and requires little training. Generally, users within Landmark can effectively support and troubleshoot any issues without the need for escalation, although technical support is responsive and to a high standard when it is required.

“Infinity POS is our quietest system,” says Richard Dias, Landmark’s Service Delivery Manager for SAP and POS. “It does what we need it to do, and it’s an integral part of how we manage our retail business.”

Infinity POS brings locations together

Due to the very nature of the Landmark business, many of its retail branches are in remote rural areas, where the vast terrain brings its own challenges.

A key factor in the popularity of Infinity POS across its 1200 users is its ease of use.

“New employees are able to quickly learn how to use Infinity without requiring significant training,” says Richard. “This is important as many of our locations operate with only a couple of staff, and are quite isolated from other branch locations.”

Another key to the success of Infinity POS in the rural sector is its ability to function offline.

“The end to end POS solution interfaces with SAP,” explains Richard. “However, in the event of a network outage between the branch and head office, the branch POS still operates. This means branches can continue to process sales in an ‘offline’ capacity until external network services are restored. This is an important and essential feature for remote locations, where it can take some days for technicians to become available.”

Working with a legacy

Throughout its time at Landmark, Infinity POS has remained a steadfast solution in a dynamic technology scene. No matter what is going on, with Infinity POS it’s very much a case of ‘business as usual’.

“One of the advantages of Infinity POS is its ability to consistently deliver while changes have gone on around it,” says Richard.

When Landmark was acquired by Agrium, a project was undertaken to migrate the Australian POS and SAP systems to the same technology used in North America. During this time there were no further updates to the systems, so when the project was ultimately cancelled, Landmark had a POS and SAP environment which required some attention.

“What is interesting is that the Infinity POS application itself continued to do exactly what we needed it to do throughout that period, despite not having any major upgrades,” says Richard.

A sustainable future

As the biggest organisation of its type in Australia, Landmark continues to seek new ways to grow its business.

“When you get to the end of the line in terms of growth by expanding your footprint, expansion needs to come in different ways,” says Richard.

Due to the effective working relationship with Triquestra, Richard says Landmark are interested in exploring the capabilities Infinity has to further develop solutions for the company.

Working with Triquestra over the past couple of years to re-baseline the Infinity POS application and its environment, Richard says the relationship has strengthened.

“We’ve always trusted Triquestra as an organisation, and working with them throughout this time has proved to be very beneficial. They continue to assist us with our work, listen to our needs, and offer suggestions along the way about how we can work smarter. Triquestra understand our situation really well, and demonstrate they are a good partner for us.”