Gebr. Heinemann: Improving and extending payment options with an agile, real-time, and resilient checkout platform
A new approach using event-driven architecture
Spurred on by a change in its point-of-sale (POS) solution, Gebr. Heinemann set out to transform its checkout platform. With the standardization, modular approach, and reusable events enabled by SAP Integration Suite, advanced event mesh, the travel retailer can now roll out checkout services across diverse channels in a cost-effective and nimble way.
| Industry | Region | Company Size | Partner |
| Retail | Hamburg, Germany | >10,000 employees | RealCore Group GmbH |
to transfer receipts from the POS, instead of up to an hour.
to integrate new systems, instead of weeks.
to run hundreds of thousands of messages.
Team Lead, Integration Services and Platform Solutions, Gebr. Heinemann SE & Co. KG
Making services available outside the cash register solution
As a global group of companies that operates and supplies shops at airports and border crossings, as well as on cruise ships, ferries, and airplanes, Gebr. Heinemann SE & Co. KG aspires to “turn travel time into valuable time.”
Around 600 cash registers serve these stores, and the checkout platform needs to perform every time. So, when its existing point-of-sale (POS), or cash register, solution was due to be discontinued, Gebr. Heinemann saw an opportunity for reinvention. Its old approach involved implementing any special services needed beyond standard retail functions, such as taking customer payments, directly into the checkout platform. These special services might include scanning a boarding card, processing a tax refund, applying age-control or volume-related laws to alcohol sales, or managing the cross-border security issues of sealed bags containing duty-free products.
Benedikt Althaus, the company’s team lead for integration services and platform solutions, explains the situation as follows: “We wanted to have these technical implementations, or services, available for checkout channels beyond our stationary POS, such as across self-checkouts, mobile POS, and web shops. By no longer implementing these services directly in the POS, we could also avoid having to reinvent the wheel any time we changed our POS solution. That was the idea behind our new checkout platform.”
Another goal was to remove tight coupling between systems so that a system continues to work when a related one is not available. By decoupling systems, Gebr. Heinemann could help ensure, for example, that an ERP system in another territory could feed data to cash registers while the local ERP system was unavailable. Likewise, it could provide the support required to enable a loyalty-card program to keep running while its underlying ERP system was being maintained.
Achieving this independence would also enable the company to resell its POS to different companies in the group that run their own systems for ERP, pricing, and more. Althaus elaborates: “Like a kind of spider’s web between all of these systems, we wanted the new solution to be able to connect with and deliver data to the systems used by non-Heinemann shops too.”
Adopting a new event-driven approach
Gebr. Heinemann looked at the software available and narrowed its choice down to two cloud-based, managed solutions that support event-driven architecture (EDA). Althaus explains: “An event might involve something like updating a soft-drink description. With EDA, you’re sending out that information regardless of whom it concerns. Anyone can subscribe to this stream by saying they’re interested in, say, all product changes related to drinks. The party announcing the event doesn’t care who’s subscribed, and they don’t tell recipients how to act on this information—they’re just populating this event to the public.”
SAP Integration Suite, advanced event mesh, part of SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP), was the perfect fit, supporting EDA to enable real-time business processes at scale while connecting intuitively with SAP and third-party software. Meanwhile, the Cloud Integration capability within SAP Integration Suite facilitates connectivity, data transformation, and orchestration. And a third capability within SAP Integration Suite, API Management, helps centralize API governance, enforce standards, and promote reuse.
According to Althaus, these capabilities act like three interlocking circles underpinning the new platform. He describes advanced event mesh as being similar to “a public highway on which you can send cars around the world very, very quickly. You also need a lane directed toward this highway, which we call microintegrations, and we use Cloud Integration and containers running on the Kyma runtime for SAP BTP to create this lane.” The architecture diagram shows how combining capabilities from SAP Integration Suite with SAP Integration Suite, advanced mesh helps Gebr. Heinemann meet its diverse integration needs through one platform.
One feature that differentiated advanced event mesh from the other solution being appraised was topic routing, which involves tagging events so that they can be routed to subscribers. Referring again to the example of the soft drink, Althaus says: “With topic routing, we can route this information to anyone who’s interested in, say, all drinks, or in that particular brand, or in product changes in general. The other solution we looked at couldn’t disseminate this event to the different subscribers. That was really crucial for us, as we might receive the same product information from two different territories—and both descriptions might be written in a different way. With topic routing, one description will not override the other, so each territory receives the product information it needs.”
With its POS solution soon to be sunset, Gebr. Heinemann worked on deploying an alternative. As this happened, the company implemented advanced event mesh with help from cloud integration partner RealCore Group GmbH and rolled out several use cases. The first involved efficiently updating the more than 350,000 electronic shelf labels it uses across the world. The second involved making daily counts of guests aboard cruise ships. In this second scenario, decoupling plays an important role, allowing ships to communicate their guest count even in the middle of the ocean without Internet access. And a third case involved smoothly sending data including product, pricing, and loyalty card information from the checkout platform to the company’s third-party customer relationship management system.
Improving performance, visibility, and stability
Having embraced EDA using advanced event mesh, Gebr. Heinemann now has, according to Althaus, “a much smoother and more stable service offering with which we can modernize and expand our business very quickly.” Althaus was surprised at the intuitive nature of the capability, saying: “We were really not expecting the ease of integration with advanced event mesh. We switched it on without any technical issues. Then, it was just a matter of conceptual things like how to name topics and events or format event messages. It was surprisingly easy compared with other solutions.”
Transparency across services is improved, with message delivery visible directly after an event occurs. Integration costs and delivery times are down. For example, creating the interface and reporting structures needed to get stock information from a group company used to take several weeks, but the company can now get this data in a matter of hours. According to Althaus, “If an event is there, everyone can just hook in and play around with it,” meaning new integrations can quickly reuse existing events for areas such as product, exchange-rate, or pricing information.
Althaus notes that the company can access information much more quickly and with less effort because messages are standardized. It can also run hundreds of thousands of messages per second without negatively affecting systems. For instance, publishing a large volume of price changes in one day previously caused the electronic-shelf-labeling solution to crash. Now, with EDA, that solution can handle 300,000 events without issues, and it can deploy these price changes in 30 minutes instead of several hours.
What’s more, Althaus explains that advanced event mesh has also brought about a shift in the company’s mindset. “Before, we could see what information was being sent. Now, we just provide the highway. We send your messages very quickly from A to B, but we can’t see what’s inside them. This has completely changed the way we connect new systems.”
Reusing events for innovative new use cases
Having successfully rolled out three use cases, Althaus—and his colleagues across the company—can already see how advanced event mesh opens up new opportunities. He says, “It’s speeding up, as the more events we have, the more requests we get. There are things our business wants to see in the future, such as the ability to send receipts from a cash register to a loyalty mobile app, and we’re working toward this. One short-term goal is to get our new POS solution live, which will benefit all our events.”
On the promotions side, the company plans to use advanced event mesh to help update and align activity across group companies. Another potential application involves efficiently compiling the data needed for stock replenishment.
These plans are just the beginning for a checkout platform set to become even more agile and resilient thanks to advanced event mesh.
Want to know more about Gebr. Heinemann?
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Featured partner
RealCore’s services for SAP solutions range from system integration and process optimization to the implementation of modern IT architectures. The firm helps companies in diverse industries realize their digital visions with tailor-made, efficient, and future-proof solutions. In this project, RealCore’s cloud integration expertise helped Gebr. Heinemann smoothly launch its first three use cases using advanced event mesh.