Dash securitysafety tip basics
Using multiple retail reference architectures, it validates proof-of-concept via interoperability testing. This enables a retailer to expedite implementation of the Cisco Unified Communications Store Employee Dashboard within their environment.
The Cisco Unified Communications Store Employee Dashboard target audience is sales engineers that have retail accounts interested in using an IP telephony environment or expanding the utility of their existing IP telephony investment.
It is assumed that administrators of the Cisco Unified Communications Store Employee Dashboard have experience with installation and acceptance of the products covered by this network design. In addition, it is assumed that the administrators understand the procedures required to upgrade and troubleshoot networks at a basic level.
The Cisco Unified Communications Store Employee Dashboard solution from IPcelerate and Cisco is a suite of IP-based applications developed to improve employee productivity and facilitate inter-store communications. These IPcelerate applications integrate data and voice capabilities, and are presented in a simple to use single dashboard-view accessible from Cisco IP-enabled phones. This solution was validated using Cisco Intelligent Retail Network architectures as the foundation representing an actual retailer.
This application can be used for an immediate shift or future shifts. The Cisco Unified Communications Store Employee Dashboard solution facilitates closer collaboration between remote stores and management through pre-programmed conferencing features.
This solution is part of the Cisco Unified Communications for Retail suite of IP communications and collaboration tools, designed to accelerate the flow of information to transform the store experience. Now, growing businesses can take full advantage of network technology to help cut costs, enable new applications and services, and improve organizational efficiency. Users of this guide includes corporate managers, corporate finance, and corporate VPs responsible for retail store operations.
The Cisco Unified Communications Store Employee Dashboard solution facilitates many benefits to the retailer and employees. Benefits to the retailer include:. The validation of the solution performed by Cisco and IPcelerate as described in Testing demonstrate a proof-of-concept implementation of specific services using IPcelerate IPsession within a Cisco IP telephony environment. IPcelerate IPsession is a feature-rich product with many capabilities beyond the subset of the features that comprise the Cisco Unified Communications Store Employee Dashboard solution.
Implementation of the solution requires a full implementation of IPsession. IPsession enables end users to invoke various communication features from the user interface on Cisco IP phones that are base features of IPsession but were not tested within the scope of this solution.
For more information on these features, refer to the IPcelerate's website: Wireless is a major component of the Intelligent Retail Network reference architecture. However, no wireless components were tested in this release of the Cisco Unified Communications Store Employee Dashboard solution. The deployment method is a centralized server; IPsession services will not be available if a WAN failure occurs. The Cisco Unified Communications Store Employee Dashboard solution was deployed and tested within three retail network environments: These three store models were constructed using the Cisco Intelligent Retail Network reference architectures.
Each store model has varying degrees of redundancy and resiliency. For more information, see the following URL: The intelligent mechanisms control many activities automatically for example, when the daily deposit is not completed at the scheduled time, an alert is sent to the respective store.
This section provides a short description of the features in the IPsession Retail application. The Retail IPsession application allows multiple store scenarios.
One IPsession server can accommodate multiple stores. Timecard and Shift Management provides shift allocation for employees, managing shifts, shift planner, clocking in and clocking out, shift coverage notification and shift reporting. It also provides time-off requests and approvals. The application performs clerical and accounting processing so that employees can focus on store specific activities.
The Task Alert feature is a daily task reminder. Each task alert is sent to the store phones throughout the day as scheduled. This ensures that the employees do not forget to complete a task at a certain time on a daily basis, allowing employees to focus on better customer service. Task alert appears on Cisco IP phones as a text message along with an audible message. Daily Deposits sends a notification to the store to enter their daily deposits. Once it is inserted, reports can be generated on daily, weekly, and monthly basis.
All the retail specific applications are grouped under "IPsession Retail Store" application in the IPsession web interface. All the features are grouped under the retail specific applications. These network architectures exhibit best practices for retail networks and provide the robust foundation for the higher-level services and applications. Business and collaboration applications connect users and business processes to the infrastructure.
The application layer of the framework includes the combined business and collaboration applications from Cisco and IPcelerate. These applications are enhanced through the Cisco Series color IP phones, which have touch-screen enabled displays. Application services are the connection from the applications to the shared services of the integrated network services layer.
The integrated Network Services Layer is where filtering, caching, and protocol optimization interact with applications or application middleware services to optimize the performance from the network to the end user. Process control is simplified by using common infrastructure services such as collaboration, security, and identity. These are key advantages that aid in operational reporting and security policy enforcements.
Fewer services that are shared across more intelligent devices increases the operational efficiency of the whole system. These services are a combination of in-store security services shared across multiple physical devices, central management in the data center, and virtual access to the security control plane from anywhere in the retail network.
This guide describes services that can be used to provide a secure posture for the Cisco Unified Communications Store Employee Dashboard solution. The integrated network services layer provides services that are distributed across the infrastructure layer.
This combination appeals to many different retail formats that can include the following:. This network architecture is widely used, and consolidates many services into fewer infrastructure components.
The small store also supports a variety of retail business application models because an integrated Ethernet switch supports high-speed LAN services. As more mission-critical applications and services converge onto the IP infrastructure, network uptime and application availability are more important. The dual-router and dual-LAN switch design of the medium store supports these requirements. The access layer of the network offers enhanced levels of flexibility and more access ports compared to the small store.
The distributed Cisco Catalyst switches can support a combination of larger physical buildings or a larger number of endpoints than the small store. The limitation is of this architecture is that there is no distribution layer between core layer the ISR and the access layer switches.
Network traffic can be segmented logically and physically to meet business requirements. The distribution layer of the large store architecture improves LAN performance while offering enhanced physical media connections. A larger number of endpoints can be added to the network to meet business requirements. This type of architecture is widely used by large-format retailers globally. Dual routers and distribution layer media flexibility improves network serviceability because the network is highly available and scales to support the large retail store requirements.
Routine maintenance and upgrades can be scheduled and performed more frequently, or during normal business hours, through this parallel path design. The limitation of this architecture is higher cost because of network resilience based on highly available design.
The following components are required to implement the Cisco Unified Communications Store Employee Dashboard solution:. It is the customized solutions for Cisco retail store to manage various real-time activities like time card, shift management, daily deposit, task alerts to accelerate day-to-day business processes, and focus more on customer satisfaction. Its intelligent mechanism controls many activities automatically for example, when daily deposit is not entered by the scheduled time, it will send the alert to the appropriate store representative.
It builds call processing capabilities on top of the Cisco IP network infrastructure. Cisco Unified Communication Manager software extends enterprise telephony features and capabilities to packet telephony network devices such as IP phones, media processing devices, voice gateways, and multimedia applications.
This solution does not introduce any additional known caveats or limitations to existing product documentation. The small, medium, and large Intelligent Retail Network reference architectures provide a "real world" retail contextual backdrop for this solution. This is a cost-effective implementation that leverages a highly available data center staffed with trained personnel and minimizes the number of additional servers required throughout the network.
A number of servers and workstations were implemented as VMware Server virtual machines. This allowed greater flexibility within the lab environment and aligns with industry trending towards greater virtualization.
Dedicated hardware and increased resources may be required for more consistent performance in larger implementations.
Note When designing the Cisco Unified Communications Store Employee Dashboard solution, special consideration must be made to retailers that have existing Unified Communication deployment.
Employees need to be created in the IPsession Retail Application. Three unique forms of identification exist for all people that interact with this application:.
It is recommended that the user ID match the existing retailer organizational ID to reduce management overhead. This numbers only identification simplifies the sign on process of the phone. Note IPcelerate enabled the phone employee login entry numerical so that it would be easier to enter via the phone's interface. The user would not have to scroll through the keys for the correct alphabet digit on the initial form selection.
Each store has a store manager and a group of employees. Employees work on shifts in a store. A list of IP phones are assigned to the stores. Task alerts are sent to the store phones. All store specific events or notifications are sent to the store manager's cell phone or desk phone.
Shift Management is the application for managing the shifts and Timecard allows employees to clock-in and clock-out. There are two types of the shift process. Shifts must be allocated to the employee by managers prior to the employee's ability to clock-in. This requires manager approval after the employee signs in and will not be reported to payroll report unless it is approved by the manager.
Once a task alert is displayed on the store phone, employees have to acknowledge the tasks by entering their employee ID. If a task alert goes unacknowledged for five minutes configurable time settingit will resend the task alert in combination with escalation to the manager.
The escalation is sent to the store manager on his cellular phone.