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A lot goes on behind the scenes when major South African retailers modernise or migrate their IT systems. For key implementation partners like Trade Link, planning and preparation can start years before the project begins.
Trade Link, a specialist in retail IT systems, supports over 50% of leading FMCG retailers in South Africa and has a 30-year history of enabling transformation and modernisation for household name organisations.
CEO Ahmed Laher says Trade Link stays abreast of every new development in retail technology, as well as going to great lengths to understand customer strategies. It invests in building its own capabilities up to two years before customers take the plunge and modernise their systems.
“We continually build internal capabilities and partner aggressively with vendors to ensure that we are ready to translate business requirements into successful outcomes. We make the investment up to 24 months before generating the revenue: very few organisations have the scale and propensity for that type of play,” he says.
Professional services stays ahead of the game
Claire Alexander, director of Trade Link Professional Services, explains that this level of preparedness allows Trade Link to offer a full suite of consulting and project management services.
“We can play a key role in everything from scoping the business requirement from a customer level to translating that into the requirement agreement, agreeing together with the software vendor who’s going to play what role and then delivering against that,” she says.
The 40-strong Professional Services division includes a development team for app enablement and extension development, custom development and integrations, and quality assurance.
“We have the skill set, the competence and the experience to develop into the core on behalf of leading international software vendors. This is particularly important for international vendors who know their core products exceptionally well, but who don’t have our level of experience in dealing with the nuances of operating in Africa, for example fiscal requirements,” she says.
Trade Link has also invested heavily in automated testing to support service delivery. “Automated testing offers significant time savings, which may also result in cost savings. With automated testing, you can do regression automated testing on anything that existed before the new piece of development was brought into the code, which is a massive value proposition,” Alexander adds. “For customers, it means a higher level of confidence – getting releases to them a lot quicker, with far fewer issues.”
Trade Link’s focus on continuous improvement means the Professional Services division is constantly enhancing its capabilities to help futureproof customer environments.
Driving progress without dropping the ball
Laher and Alexander emphasise that while Trade Link stays abreast of global trends and invests heavily in continuous improvement, it remains focused on its foundation of trusted service delivery.
Notes Alexander: “Our innovation strategy is always concurrent to making sure we never drop the service level that we are bringing our customers today. It has to be both. Our retailers depend on us to help them deliver a consistent and differentiated customer experience to every shopper that comes through their door. So we make sure that we deliver at the highest expected level and meet all of our commitments on our SLAs, but at the same remain open to change and investing today for what we think is coming tomorrow.”
Key to achieving this is Trade Link’s strong, stable executive team, Alexander believes.
“The majority of the team members have got long tenures with the business,” she says. “They play to their area of strengths and ensure that not only are we working cohesively as an executive team, but that within our teams we also have the right culture and continuous improvement mindset. Everyone in the company is deeply committed to their role in helping us to succeed as a business, and enabling our customers to thrive.”
About Trade Link
Trade Link is a leading retail innovation and support services partner to retailers in South Africa and the rest of Africa. Strategic partner to global leading point of sale and retail solution providers, with wraparound support, development and professional services. It is our experience and deep retail knowledge that makes the difference to our customers, we are the “Trade Link” between retailers and their customers!
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