Inventory Control Experts
Posts Tagged ‘versions’
-
Back Office Inventory Features for Version 7
The velocity of new features being shipped in NeXT has really accelerated during the past 3 months. Most of the work has been centered on our Food and Beverage modules, but plenty of features for Retail have shipped as well. Version 7.26.47 was released on Sunday, November 6, 2011. The full scope of Version 7 of DataWorks’ NeXT Back Office Inventory system is massive, but here is the short list of enhancements and features that I wanted to highlight.
Product Form:
- New Wrapper to separately maintain Retail, Food and Supplies Products.
- New Menu to Review Archived Products
- New Lock / Unlock of Cost and Retail Controls
- Standardization of Product Attributes to enable control for Retail, Food, Supplies or Global access.
- Taxable Purchases setup for Supplies
- Catch Weight definition for Food
- Sysco 832 EDI order guide import
- Vendor Product EDI Linking / Unlinking capacity
- Vendor Product to Manufacturer product creation.
-
RMS POS System and Customer Tracking
Ask anyone in the POS industry what “RMS” is and they will tell you that “RMS” is Microsoft’s POS and Inventory Control system. But back in 1988, when DataWorks started creating inventory control software for the fashion retail industry, we marketed and shipped our own software called “RMS”.
RMS stood for Retail Management Solutions. One year the “S” was changed to mean “Software”, and for a month or two the “S” stood for System. As I recall the change may have not even been deliberate. A typesetter or a proof-reader may have made the switch without anyone knowing.
When I get a chance I will insert the DataWorks RMS logo here. It was the last logo I created for the company.
Twenty-three years later (2010) we have integrated NeXT®, our enterprise back office inventory software, to Microsoft Dynamics RMS POS software.
-
Reports – Expanding your Business Intelligence
We have somewhere north of 500 published reports in version 6 of NeXT. Each report has at least 5 query options, but most have over 50 query options. The reports are beautifully designed and a buyer or retail manager can really dive into the performance of product lines and SKUs.
That’s pretty good, but we went two steps further with version 6.
-
Retail 101. Fewer Choices equal More Sales
Our local mega-movie-complex figured out many years ago that if they offered too many candy choices, they actually lowered their candy revenue. What they probably learned in a Retail 101 class (or a corporate manual) was that if you have too many choices, the customer takes longer to make a selection, the line moves slower, and because the movie start time is fixed, folks bounce out of line and head for their seats without making a purchase.
I have noticed a similar problem at our local Subway franchise. Folks line up for their 6-inch meals during the lunch rush. Subway newbies struggle with the menu matrix variables. A programing language is spoken under the “Order Here” sign: syntax needs to be in the proper order to get the sub built quickly. Start with size. Follow with sandwich type. Delineate the bread selection. Keep it moving, one side step after another until you belly up to the cash register. Get any of the code out of sequence and you will get an onion operator mismatch or a division by pickle error. If you get too many noobs queued up, forget about the quick turn and burn, you are stuck in the thick of the sub-plot. After a couple of long sessions of staring at the potato chip rack, I now come prepared with a trade magazine (Hospitality Upgrade and Wired are my popular periodicals) or my current novel (large helpings of William Gibson have been consumed in the midst of the Subway sub-culture).
If you are a retail manager, give this some thought: at the cash wrap you can display a lot of snap item choices – but at what point are there too many choices? When are you creating counter clutter and slowing down the point of sale? My aesthetics tell me that your counter should have a maximum of five SKUs to pick from. Odd number of choices have more visual power then even numbers – three is better than two, and five is better than four. But more than five is just noise.
-
That Was Your Retail Idea
I like Microsoft’s Windows 7 TV commercial where users flashback to an inspirational moment about improving Windows. It’s cleverly done where the Windows-7-Was-My-Idea sequence depicts a younger, thinner person – whose teeth are whiter and eyes are brighter.
My — 25 plus years in software development, couch-potato, Monday-morning-marketing, 6 years of art school, thinking about it outside the 30 second TV script — critique spun out of my noggin this way: the earth must have looped around the sun a couple times between the moment of divine inspiration and the feature’s debut. One fellow looks like his moment of bliss was followed by 10 planetary orbits and maybe 10,000 glazed donuts. That’s a lot of donuts. And 10 years is a long time to wait for a software feature. So the complete gulp of the ad went down like this: a light zesty initial splash, followed by a sour after taste.