Extra Pte Limited T/A Extra Supermarket (https://extra.com.fj/ ) is a young and fast-growing supermarket chain in Fiji. It opened its first branch in the western city of Lautoka in August 2017 and has since witnessed excellent growth.

The company is led by a dynamic management team with deep experience in supermarket retail in Fiji. Extra Supermarket was started with a vision of bringing international standards of shopping to Fiji. They have had meteoric growth despite challenges posed by the global COVID19 pandemic and the economic slowdown caused by that.



At present, Extra Supermarket has 3 branches and 1 bakery. The turnover in 2021-22 was around $115 million and is projected to be around $135 million this year. They have plans to rapidly expand the business. The POS system that they were using was having issues even with their existing volumes and may not be able to handle the projected expansions.

A key strength of Extra Supermarket is the range of products on offer. They sell everything from basic vegetables such as Onions and Potatoes, basic groceries like flour, rice and oil to high quality homeware, a range of toys, televisions, electric bicycles, etc. They also operate a deli inside the store and sell barista type coffee, ready to eat salads, cakes etc.

In addition, they have large walk-in liquor areas where they sell a very wide variety of wines, beer and spirits.

They wanted a POS system that could be designed from the ground up to support high-volume, multi-location retail environments.

The technical team of Tekovai Solutions Pvt Limited is led by a Chartered Accountant with strong technical acumen who had more than 7 years of experience as the Chief Information Officer of a large supermarket chain in Fiji. Tekovai wanted to leverage this experience and build a world class POS Solution that would meet and exceed the expectations of demanding supermarket customers. Tekovai and Extra decided to work together in the development of this POS solution.

ExtraPOS was built with a development effort of almost 3 years. It is developed as a full featured Point of Sale system specifically engineered to handle high volumes and work in a distributed environment with WAN connectivity between the various branches. The software has an ERP backend that can either be used independently or be used as a platform for further integration with major ERP packages like SAP or Oracle.

The solution was implemented by a team that went on-site to Fiji. The implementation was very successful and the product is now supported by the offshore team based in India. We are hitting around 1.5 million records a month with weekly and daily variations. Transaction volumes can be as low as 35,000 records a day to as high as 75,000 records a day. The system has absolutely no issues in handling these volumes despite the need to send each sale to the Tax Authority Servers and obtain the docket level tax from that server.

The customer put forth the following CTQ (Critical to Quality) that the POS application had to meet:

⦁ Performance was key with such large transaction Volumes. Cashers at Fiji are very quick in scanning and the processing should be in milliseconds. Customers should not be made to wait for any extra second.
⦁ Multiple types of promotions should be supported. Fiji is very competitive market and pricing is very fluid. Flexible pricing options with strong tracking and recording is essential.
⦁ Shift closure for the casher should be smooth and accurate.
⦁ Secondary Customer side display should be supported. Customer should be able to see the transactions being scanned and the amount and discount to be visible as soon as the item is scanned.



⦁ Pricing changes will be done any time in the day and discounts can be withdrawn after certain time in the day. Hence all promotions should be by time duration. Like promotion will end by 12 noon.
⦁ The application should support gift coupons and loyalty cards.
⦁ As per Fiji Government regulation, every transaction should be sent to Government portal for tax calculation and come back before the docket is printed for the customer. This should happen instantly when the customer checks out.

Currently ExtraPOS application is live and meets all the above CTQs. It is running successfully with minimum support from Tekovai team. The POS application was able to meet the volume and performance during the peak Diwali and Christmas festivals where the daily transactions crossing over 100,000 transaction lines.

Voice of the Customer
Our vision is to bring a world-class shopping experience to Fiji. To achieve this, we needed a software that could support our entire business process with seamless integration between the customer facing point-of-sale and the backend ERP to manage our supply chain, inventory and finance. We also needed a range of actionable reports to help with decision making. Tekovai Solutions worked closely with us to deliver and implement a software that ticks all the boxes. We are impressed by the business knowledge and technical skills of the team and are very happy with the software.

⦁ Kavishay Abhimannu, Managing Director, Extra Super Market, Fiji

** Prior Permission have been obtained from the customer to put the photos / data of the Extra Super Market in this case study.