Activate 52ViKING Emergency POS

This topic is primarily for administrators and other people who manage a Fiftytwo solution

You activate 52ViKING Emergency POS per chain. You can't activate 52ViKING Emergency POS individually for individual stores.

When you activate Emergency POS, all cloud-based stores in your chain will switch to Emergency POS, which will affect all mobile POSs deployed in those stores, and not only those mobile POSs for which the stores' store controllers have been updated with the Emergency POS solution and set up to provide Emergency POS data. When stores switch to Emergency POS, the following happens:

  • All connections between the stores' store controllers and MPOS devices will be closed immediately.

  • Any active MPOS devices in the stores will stop running regular MPOS.

  • On the MPOS devices, any ongoing sales that shop assistants have begun before the activation of Emergency POS will be lost, but data about completed sales will be backed up.

  • MPOS devices will use the same POS IDs as before the activation of Emergency POS.

  • Effectively, the stores' mobile POSs will be substituted with Emergency POSs.

    If customers have a little patience, shop assistants can begin any lost sales anew once their MPOS devices have switched to Emergency POS and the devices' user interfaces have refreshed.

To activate 52ViKING Emergency POS for your chain, do the following:

  1. Go to config.fiftytwo.com and log in with the Emergency POS activation credentials that you received from Fiftytwo when you purchased the Emergency POS solution.

    If you can't access the Emergency POS activation website, for example because you can't find your credentials, Fiftytwo can activate your Emergency POS solution for you. If you want Fiftytwo to activate Emergency POS for you, contact Fiftytwo and be prepared to answer some security questions.

  2. Select Chain.

  3. Click the name of the required chain.

  4. Click Activate Emergency POS.


    Ilustration only. Click the button on config.fiftytwo.com.

  5. Select the date of the data backup that you want to use for your chain during the emergency.

    You select one backup date for your entire chain, even though the backups themselves come from individual stores in your chain.

    If a store for some reason hasn't uploaded a backup on the date that you select, Emergency POS will use the nearest older backup from that store. If there's no older backup from that store, Emergency POS will use the nearest newer backup from that store.


    No backup available from store on selected date
    Emergency POS will select a backup from the nearest previous date, if available
    If not, Emergency POS will select a backup from the nearest next date

    Provided that stores have uploaded backups, there'll always be at least one backup from every store that Emergency POS can use.

    To make sure that your chain's stores will have backed up data that they can use in case of emergencies, you must regularly monitor each relevant 52ViKING store controller's error log, so that you can react in time if backups or backup uploads fail. Otherwise you risk that your stores have no backed-up data to use in emergencies. If you have chain administration rights, you can use your chain's 52ViKING enterprise controller to monitor store controller error logs centrally.

  6. Click Activate Emergency POS.

    Emergency POS is now activated for your chain.

How long does it take from we activate Emergency POS until it's up and running in stores?Closed That depends on the size of your chain. For example, if you chain has 350 stores that should each have four mobile devices enabled for Emergency POS (so that 1400 devices need to be enabled across the chain), we expect Emergency POS to be up and running across the whole chain in less than one hour.

We recommend that you do not use your stores' regular stationary POSs (including self-service checkouts (SCOs)) during emergencies. Even though the stationary POSs are likely to work in offline mode (where they rely on article data stored in local databases on each stationary POS), they will have received their data from the store's store controller, and there's a chance that the store controller may have been compromised by the emergency (cyberattack or similar) at the point in time when it sent data to the stationary POSs.
It's safer to only use mobile POS with the Emergency POS solution during emergencies because they use data that 1) was backed up before the emergency, and 2) resides in a cloud environment that's isolated from the emergency.

When Emergency POS is up and running in a store, shop assistants use the mobile POS solution 52ViKING MPOS to sell articles.

When your shop assistants sell articles during an emergency, 52ViKING MPOS will work just like during normal day-to-day operations, so if your shop assistants are familiar with MPOS, they'll not need any special training.

The focus of the Emergency POS solution is to enable you to keep selling articles during emergencies. Because the Emergency POS solution deliberately has no connection to the store controller once Emergency POS is activated, shop assistants will not have access to functionality that depends on the store controller (for example receipt search and returns) during emergencies. Also, if your organization's MPOS solution has integrations to other solutions, for example customer clubs or webshops, those integrations may not be available during emergencies.

Related: 52ViKING Emergency POS

Related: Set up 52ViKING to run Emergency POS

Related: Deactivate 52ViKING Emergency POS and recover from emergency