Warung Pintar is the answer for a new retail model in Indonesia. By integrating technology into the traditional warung (kiosks), the company is enabling kiosk owners to use digital technology to grow their businesses.
Sofian Hadiwijaya, chief technology officer at Warung Pintar, says, “We keep learning and innovating to meet the needs of kiosk owners. In the future, owners will use more data to create new business opportunities.”
Warung Pintar needed a reliable backend infrastructure to collect and process point-of-sale (POS) data. The company also wanted the infrastructure to support analytics-based services in the future to give kiosk owners a deeper understanding of purchasing behaviors. “We found that the cost of an on-premises infrastructure was too high, so we turned to the cloud,” says Hadiwijaya.
The company chose to run its backend infrastructure on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud. Hadiwijaya comments, “I’ve been using AWS since 2012, and I know that many global businesses use AWS services.” With support from AWS solution architects, Warung Pintar built its cloud infrastructure to support its kiosks within a day.
Warung Pintar pays for only the duration of the AWS services that it uses. Hadiwijaya says, “Not having to pay the upfront costs of an on-premises infrastructure helped us get the business up and running.” The core AWS services that Warung Pintar uses include Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances, which run the POS system, and Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS), which stores the POS data. Security camera data is stored in Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3).
The stability of the AWS services means accurate sales data is constantly available. This, in turn, helps kiosk owners increase revenue because they can identify slow-moving items and excess inventory. Hadiwijaya comments, “By using AWS, kiosk owners no longer spend hours recording sales data by hand because they have 24/7 access to highly accurate records.”
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