Case Study: Multi Site Retail EPOS Rollout

The Situation

A major UK retailer needed to replace its end of life EPOS infrastructure across more than 200 stores. The programme had been running for six months under internal management but was significantly behind schedule. Store rollouts were happening at less than half the planned rate. Five separate vendors were involved in hardware supply, software configuration, network connectivity, payment processing, and installation, but nobody was coordinating them under a single delivery framework.

Trading disruption during installations was causing store managers to resist the rollout schedule, creating a cycle of delays and rescheduling that made the programme increasingly difficult to manage.

What Elisabeth Did

Elisabeth took over as the programme manager responsible for the complete rollout. She immediately restructured the delivery plan around a factory model: standardised installation packages, pre configured hardware, and coordinated vendor scheduling that minimised store downtime to a single overnight window per location.

She brought all five vendors together under a unified programme governance framework with weekly coordination meetings, shared milestone tracking, and clear accountability for each vendor's deliverables. She established escalation paths that could resolve issues within 24 hours rather than the weeks it had been taking previously.

She also worked directly with the retail operations team to build a realistic rollout schedule that balanced programme pace with trading priorities, avoiding peak trading periods and working around store specific constraints.

The Results

• All 200 plus stores completed within 8 months
• Final programme cost 15 percent under the revised budget
• Average store downtime reduced from 3 days to 12 hours per installation
• Five vendors coordinated under single governance framework
• Zero stores missed their go live date in the final phase
• Store manager satisfaction scores improved from 2.1 to 4.3 out of 5