my361: 361 Retail's support, in full view of every shop.

01The client

361 Retail provides technical support to retail and restaurant chains. Its clients are groups with dozens of shops each, where a terminal that will not print or a scale out of calibration stops a whole shop from billing until someone gets there.

02The problem

The operation ran on two systems that did not talk to each other. Support requests went into a ticketing system; the work done, the hours spent and the repairs were entered in the ERP. Neither faced outwards: the shops had access to neither.

That had three costs, every day:

• Phone calls to find out the obvious: whether the request had been received and when the technician would turn up. Every question tied up a technician.
• Management questions with no quick answer: how many requests each shop opened, how much support time the group used, which fault comes up most. The information existed, split across the two systems, and pulling it together was manual work.
• Nothing to show: when a contract came up for renewal, there was no simple way to put on the table what had been done during the year.

And there was one condition that guided the whole design: both systems were in production, used every day by the support teams. Changing, migrating or replacing them was out of the question.

03The solution

MCIT built my361, a portal that gives each 361 Retail client its own view of its support, assembled from the systems that already existed, without touching them.

The portal carries the 361 Retail brand. It was designed from the start to be their product, not a tool of ours with a different name on the door.

my361.pt

04How we connected it

The heart of the project is five connections, all reversible and none interfering with the source systems:

• Requests, conversations and bookings are copied from the ticketing system to the portal, minute by minute, without changing anything in it.
• From the ERP come the companies, the shops, the job reports and the support hours: the answer to "what was done in my shop".
• When a shop opens a request or replies to a technician, the portal delivers it through the ticketing system's official entrance. If that system is down, the portal keeps trying until it gets through.
• Each request lands directly with the team that looks after that client.
• Access details, password resets and notifications go out by email, from Microsoft 365, with a record of every message sent.

Security keeps pace: two-step authentication for the internal team, virus scanning of every attachment and an admin console kept off the internet. Installation and updates take a single step, with automatic checks before every release.

05The results

• The mirror works at full scale: more than 75 000 requests and 160 000 messages, updated minute by minute.
• The source systems were left intact: no changes, no data migration, no downtime for the teams who use them every day.
• Bringing a chain on board takes minutes: more than a hundred shops received access in a single run, without a single failed send.
• A group with five companies and more than a hundred shops is up and running with its own routing.
• The platform keeps an eye on itself, with alerts for the 361 Retail team and a usage history.
• It stopped being a project and became a product: numbered versions, a manual branded for each client and a subscription model. 361 Retail now sells it to the chains it serves, and the first client group is already in production.