NTIA Putting Final Touches on ‘Live Pilot’ Coupon Test
The NTIA plans around Jan. 3 to release details of the “live pilot” test it will run next month of coupon distributions and redemptions under an “operational capability demonstration” (OCD) phase already under way (CED Dec 12 p1), an agency spokesman said. Federal employees in at least two markets -- Wichita, Kan., and Washington, D.C. - - will participate in the tests, said a spokeswoman for CLC Services, the NTIA subcontractor that’s handling retailer certification and coupon redemption. CLC itself is based in Wichita.
Sign up for a free preview to unlock the rest of this article
If your job depends on informed compliance, you need International Trade Today. Delivered every business day and available any time online, only International Trade Today helps you stay current on the increasingly complex international trade regulatory environment.
Initially, the live pilot was to have taken place in Washington, Kansas City, Kan., and Portland, Ore., we're told. Nebraska Furniture Mart’s Kansas City store was to have participated, said Mark Shaw, CE divisional merchandise manager. The store had planned to install an end-cap in its TV department trumpeting availability of Zenith’s DTT900 coupon-eligible box, Shaw said. The end cap was to have housed a pair of 27-inch legacy TV sets. One was to be hooked up to a DTT900, the other not, to show the picture quality improvement that can be had by installing a coupon- eligible converter box, Shaw said.
Under the DTV statute, consumers may begin requesting coupons on Jan. 1. NTIA plans to begin distributing the coupons Feb. 17, one year to the day before analog TV service ends, the agency announced just last week. Since NTIA has signed on 111 retailers representing 14,000 storefronts for the program, it’s confident that by Feb. 17 there will be ample converter boxes available at retail, the agency said.
Among certified retailers we polled, not all said they plan to be up and ready to redeem coupons on Feb. 17, but Nebraska Furniture Mart is one account that will be ready, Shaw told us. However, it will forgo making point-of-sale changes to accept coupons and instead plans to authorize coupon transactions by interactive phone, Shaw said. “We're going to use the manual version” of authorization, Shaw said. “We're not going to rewrite our IT system because I'm anticipating that I'm not going to sell a thousand of these a month.”
To successfully complete the OCD phase for coupon distribution and redemptions, the IBM team of which CLC is a member plans to process at least 100 “sample transactions” through the system, it told NTIA in the contract it landed in August. According to the contract, the simulations will “cover several use cases” involving a variety scenarios, such as coupons issued to ineligible households. “Once the sample coupons have been activated, we will initiate the redemption process, using retailers who have agreed to participate in the OCD,” the contract said. “The goal is to complete the lifecycle of the coupon through all expected retailer authorization and settlement request scenarios.”