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.
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