OLD TECHNOLOGY AS A STRATEGIC ADVANTAGE

RIL is a household name in Fiji-people of all socioeconomic statuses, including the country's prime minister, shop at its stores. [...]RIL was one of the first companies to be awarded the Gold Card certificate by the Fiji Revenue and Customs Authority (FRCA), the country's tax department. Over the last decade, however, competitors have moved beyond manual accounting systems to implement on-premise or cloud-based enterprise resource planning (ERP) solutions such as EPICOR, Microsoft Dynamics NAV, Greentree, or SAP. In part, this is because CBA is only "online" for a brief period each day to transmit data between headquarters and retail stores and because the old network operating system is scarcely in use and doesn't attract much attention from hackers. * There are no power-hungry operating systems or servers to overheat from lack of air conditioning in Fiji's tropical climate. * Fiji's national infrastructure being what it is, there are intermittent internet connectivity problems that delay nightly sales data transmissions to the head office, but these delays have never interrupted a store's ability to process sales because in-store sales processing doesn't rely on internet connectivity. * From an external auditor's perspective, CBA's modules-based accounting is transparent and easy to follow, and RIL has received clean audit reports each year. * Most important, the operating costs are minimal. [...]we gained an appreciation for Mr. N's unwavering focus on basic cost-benefit assessments.