NESTO Group

Case study | Nesto
Challenge
Demanding retail environments
Every day 100,000 shoppers visit the 43 Nesto
hypermarkets in UAE, Bahrain, Kuwait,
Oman and Saudi Arabia. Established in 2004,
Nesto has grown from modest beginnings to
become one of the most respected retail
names in the United Arab Emirates and its
impressive growth is set to continue with
plans to open ten further stores across the
Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) region in
2016 and 2017.
Part of the Western International Group, Nesto
sells everything from food to fashion and
home to leisure. Its products range from
groceries, healthcare, beauty, frozen and
chilled items, meat, sh and vegetables to
consumer electronics, household goods,
stationery and clothing.
Nesto’s achievements are based on a
philosophy of providing quality products at
competitive prices but there is another key
ingredient to its success and that is its
determination to deliver the best possible
customer experience.
However, with many options available to
them, consumers can be very demanding, as
Nesto’s head of Group IT, Muneer V.
Abdurahman, explains: “Our mission is to
become the largest retailer in the GCC
supermarket and hypermarket sector but
retail is very competitive.
“Here in the Middle East it is very important to
provide critical customer service at the Point
of Sale (POS) because customers are not
prepared to wait for a long time.”
In the past, Nesto had hit diculties when
seeking POS hardware that would meet its
exacting requirements.
“I need a secure POS solution that oers fast
service with speedy transactions to increase
our throughput but this was an area where our
old legacy systems were failing. Poor
performance was one of the challenges we
faced and another issue was compatibility
with the third party hardware such as
printers,” says Abdurahman. “Also we had an
issue with corruption and subsequent data
loss. After close monitoring we were ensured
that the problem was not on the database or
to do with the software application.
Operations were crashing during peak
business hours because the old systems could
not handle bulk data processing.”
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