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