Store Dashboard What's in it

Introduction
As the head of IT for stores, the prime responsibility is to keep the store running on the IT, without any downtime. Stores are so reliant on IT applications, network and hardware, that, if any of them don't function, store does not function. Every head of IT for stores wishes to know the status as Green every day. What are the ingredients of that 'Green' status mean? This is so vast, it can be a monitoring application on its own. Read on.

Store operations
There are so many things going on in the store. Merchandise arrive late in the night or early in the morning and their receipt is registered and moved to backroom. Regular items have a schedule to go from backroom to the front store shelves. New lines of items are pre-planned where and when they need to be moved.
Within this activity, store network, receiving handheld wireless devices, access points, routers, receiving application server and so on have contributed to register the receipt and increase the inventory status in the IT systems. For the store to recognize these cartons and items, a whole bunch of central application systems and servers were updated already with barcode number, quantity of cartons and items within carton and so on.

Store personnel start using the Point of Sale application on the store server and registers to prepare the store IT systems to handle the sales and customers for the day. Normally called store open procedure involving a few simple or complex steps depending on how they are setup and size of the retailer. IT infrastructure is playing a critical role in silent but obvious mode when all this is done.

Store starts handling customer transactions. These transactions involve registering sales, processing tenders, helping customers with returns or exchange, cancel out some transactions half way, suspend some transactions to help customer find more items and so on. In preparation to these transactions, the night before, several interactions happen between the store servers and the central servers in regards to maintaining the items, barcodes, prices, promotions etc. Price tags are prepared in coordination with central server which decide on the price for items in each store. In the background, several IT infrastructure components are orchestrating all these so well, it looks painless for the store personnel to go on about their business spic and span. Some of these IT infrastructure components are, network data exchanges between store server and central servers, updates within store databases or files, printers etc.

In the case of return or exchange transactions, store relies on a central server to look up the original sale transaction. In the case of card transactions, store register application relies on an approval message from a third party bank server. All these happen at the time when customer is waiting, so having these IT infrastructure components in working condition every day is paramount.

When the day is completed in the store from customers point of view, the day is still on for the store personnel. They record the revenue in the systems, submit or keep the cash deposits ready for bank to pick up, count the inventory, tally the credit card slips and so on. These are done with the help of IT applications and devices. When the personnel face any issue with these IT components, it is sometimes a severe issue for revenue accounting central applications, depending on the period, like week, month or year ending.

When all is done and quiet in the store, the servers in the store work silently still, taking backups, downloading and applying patches and getting ready for the next day.

Store IT Dashboard
For someone who is working in managing the store operations, whatever is said above is nothing new. They also would be having their own daily spreadsheets, batch program output files, email alerts, pager alerts etc to monitor the happenings in the store sitting at remote locations. There could be retailers using well formatted dashboards in the form of spread sheets or webpages or other means. The following dashboard may happen to be something similar. The main idea about this is, to propose a unified daily dashboard which will be very useful.

Dashboard design
Store operations IT manager and her/his team logs into a webpage with an authenticated user ID and password. The landing page gives several links, depending on the user privilege. They are described below.
a. Store selection link - select the store name or number. Or search for it. Or use hierarchy to drill down the hierarchy to go to the store. It opens the store specific webpage.
b.  Network status link - This gives the status of wireless and wired networks, devices. Especially about connectivity to internet, central servers, bank servers, registers, hand held devices and so on
c. Servers health monitor link - this gives the status of servers within the stores, their free diskspace, processing capability, virus threats etc
d. Printers and accessories link - this gives the status of the devices used in the stores, their working status
e. Store data health - there are several things to reconcile between the store and central servers. They are number of items downloaded to store, the availability of barcodes, price of items, promotional prices, clearance prices, especially at the time of starting and ending of pricing events if they are in sync.
f. Inventory status link - this provides status about the various systems that help in recording and moving inventory, current status of inventory reconciliation between store and central systems, record of damaged items and so on

Conclusion
There are so many aspects as seen above to monitor on a daily basis. Depending on the retailer, there could be even more aspects. Thus a seperate web monitoring application is a very useful and needed thing for managing stores to meet its objectives.

If you find this article helpful, or for any suggestions or comments, pls send an email to minameissri@gmail.com.
If you are interested to explore this as a solution in your store operations, feel free to contact too.

Integrate your Point of Sale with Oracle Retail Sales Audit (ReSA)

This is a short snippet that talks about the ease of integrating your exisitng Point of Sale with Oracle Retail Sales Audit.

The Challenge: Changing the customer facing front end application like Point of Sale with a new technology is a jittery experience for IT managers. What if the transition do not go as smoothly as planned? What if the sales are hit due to the change? The concerns are many.

The Trusted path: In order to overcome such challenges, but at the same time to move to a new technology, risk based planned approach is usually undertaken. The backend inventory, merchandising and sales audit systems are typically the beginning of this journey of change to new technology. And then a couple of stores are plugged on the new technology as a pilot. Upon successful operation, the transition is made for the rest of the stores.

The interim: There is always going to be an interim period, in which a mix of legacy Point of Sale and new technology, say in this case study, Oracle Retail Sales Audit (ReSA) co-exist. How to integrate these?

The interim solution: Integrating the legacy Point of Sale with ReSA is a fairly simple and low risk exercise. ReSA accepts information in the form of a flat file called Retail Transaction Log or RTLOG. There are mapping xmls and xsds available to help legacy application to map the sales transaction information to the RTLOG. A program, could be in Java, Unix Shell script, C, C++, Perl, etc can be used to quickly convert the legacy Point of Sale information to the RTLOG. That's is as easy as that. For more information or clarifications, feel free to write to me. Also pls post your feedbacks on the usefulness of this article. My email ID is minameissri@gmail.com

Smart Stores Reality and Challenges

There are several views about what Smart Stores is. When seen under the lens of 'reality' in current times and near future, the concept of Smart Store, gets little more clarity.

1. Customer Friendly Technology
Applied to different retailing lines, this means different things. Some examples are discussed here. In the case of Fashion, customers would be interested to get the best fit on their body. A good percentage of customers may be willing to shell out premium money for that extra good fit. This is different from trial room runs - where there is lethargy to try more choices after waiting in those long queues. A solution is to use virtual reality solution in the stores to offer simulation to customers based on the outfits offered by stores. Stores can even track which designs, colors, departments and lines of clothes are being tried more and compare with sales for next season planning. As applied to grocery retailing, for the fast paced or sophisticated customers, virtual browsing of isles and items under different departments at the touch of screen, sitting comfortably inside cafe store, sipping coffee is an interesting idea. This can be extended to choose on screen and pick up at counter.
2. RFID Point of Sale
A concept that is starting to take flight in recent times is RFID quick scan at the Point of Sale, which is instead of sequential item by item barcode scan. By doing RFID quick scan, all items are read at once saving time. Cost of RFID tags is the primary challenge faced by retailers. When the cost of these RFID tags reduce, or if big retailers can negotiate better unit or bulk price for these tags with vendors, this is a sure technology to be seen in stores widespread.
3. Electronic lock on items
Some retailers in US have started using Electronic lock on items. Contrary to the expensive theft locks on clothes and costly electronic goods, these Electronic locks make it possible to stick them onto even cheaper items, making it difficult for shoplifters to put them in pocket and walk-away - which is a big loss prevention for retailers.
4. Riding on increasing network speed
Most of the stores still rely on the safe locally stored information for Store operations. Mostly nightly downloads to the stores with item master, prices, promotions and hourly updates on inventory status is followed. This is low risk for the store operations since long time, since the networks were slower. However, with increasing network availability and speed, this is becoming more of overkill to duplicate data within each store. What would start taking shape is to reduce this duplication of data and relying more on central database for item and price validations at point of sale. It is to be noted that already credit cards are authorized per transaction via network. Local register files would remain the same as today, offering offline operation of Point of sale systems. The benefit of this architectural change is reduced capital investment in opening new stores by reducing the store server, hardware and miscellaneous costs associated with it.