What we do for a living

If you are an adult and live in the United States you have been asked this question countless times :  "What do you do for a living?"

My proud response is:  "I work at DataWorks. We create inventory control software for the leisure and entertainment industry. We are known as experts in Retail.  World Famous Amusement Parks, Casinos, Hospitals, Resorts and Zoos use our Software."

What  I get back  is usually,  "Oh,  does that mean you print bar-codes?"

"Yes,  we print bar-codes for merchandise that does not have UPC codes, but that is just a small part of what we do."

Sometimes I get a follow-up about employment opportunities, but rarely do I get asked about what else we do at DataWorks.

And this got me thinking. Do our customers know about everything we do? Do they know all the features we have built into our software and do they have a full grasp of all the things we can do besides printing bar-code price tags?

We have designed and created a lot of great software over the past twenty- seven years and some of our modules and features really stretch the boundaries of what we are famous for.

So first is my list of modules that go way beyond the retail tag:

• Supplies and Maintenance Module. This module allows departments to requisition products for internal use. The system also handles taxable purchases and the cost accounting for sales tax liabilities. Its perfect for your engineering department as well as housekeeping supplies.

• Food and Beverage Module. The Kitchen's ordering and fulfillment  needs and the front-of-the-house POS Menu Item management can be individually or mutually implemented. Features including Catch Weights and Recipes are supported in the F&B module.

Those two bullets are a mouth-full.  That means that almost everything that is purchased by a property can be maintained by DataWorks software. (The "almost" exception is to acknowledge that we are still completing a Fixed Assets and Capital Projects module.)

And then there is a list of features that really go a long way to saying how mature our system is. Here are some of the features that I think get lost because they might not be used in day-to-day operations, but are important in filling out the full description of what we do.

• Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) integration to your Vendors' catalogs, purchase orders and invoices.  This module will eliminate much of the tedious data input and automatically manage vendor price changes. For food vendors, this is a big plus, but for vendors like Callaway Golf,  Nike or Ralph Lauren, this can reduce the paper and work-flow needed to analyze products and place purchase orders.

• Suggested Orders module will  Analyze, Automate and Accelerate Re-Orders. The system examines sales trends, determines vendor lead- time, looks at seasonal and weekly trends by classification and suggests orders for products based on a number of variables including safety stock, order frequency and stock plans.

• Cancel Purchase Order Wizard. This feature is seldom used but it manages all old and past-due Purchase Orders from one screen. All orders are reviewed to determine if they should be cancelled, using  the business rules defined for each vendor. This feature can also be used to analyze orders that may  potentially slip past their completion date  and should be reviewed for delivery.

• Retail Markdown Engine. The feature has a query tool in it that allows you to identify product based on 30+ data points, such as price,  age and sell-through.  A review screen will allow you to find  slow-movers and mark them down permanently or temporarily.

• Purchases Order Email to Vendors. Send emails of orders directly from inside DataWorks. The software will email your vendor rep with the approved PO. It will cut down on your trips to the printer and fax machine.

•  Open-to-Buy for Budgeting. This is really two systems in one. It can act as an Executive Dash Board with its ability to show big-picture information very quickly. This module's beta users stopped running our sales reports and would use the Budgeting system to determine where they were for Year-to-Date, Period-to-Date information by Outlet, Department and Classification. Add the fact that the OTB module also tracks and budgets Begin-of-Period On-Hand, Markdowns, Shrink, On-Orders, Pending Orders and Open-to-Buy and you have a great product to manage your buying plans.

•  If you have a Warehouse or a Stockroom, you can use DataWorks to print warehouse aisle, shelf and bin labels. The system allows you to print Whole Warehouse, Entire Aisle, or Single Locations on large- format labels.

• Vendor Delivery Date Wizard. Purchase Orders  are automatically filled in with the dates that apply for this vendor. Holidays and Weekend rules are set and used to compute the suggested date.

• The Bar-code Validation feature is available in both Transfers and Receiving,where it helps validate UPC codes as they are scanned. This tool helps isolate new UPC codes immediately as they are scanned with portable data collectors.

• Customer Profiling Reports were created to track your best customers by Profitability and Revenue. We have clients use this system as the foundation of their customer loyalty programs.

• An entire General Ledger and Accounts Payable interface that can connect to any accounting system, capable of accepting map data. The capabilities are very deep with support for Cross Company Transfers with dual general journal entry support.

As I was proof-reading that last feature, my head started to numb up a bit, "What are cross company transfers anyway?" That may explain why I seldom get asked the follow-up question to "What do you do for a living?" I know I speak for everyone at DataWorks when I say "We are proud of what we do." It's easy to be proud because we have a fantastic family of  products that leverage the inventory control needs of your company in multiple ways. Wether it is supply-side logistics, sophisticated analytics  or accounting interfaces ,we have been there and are doing that. And after close to 28 years we know a thing or two about printing bar-codes too.

Retail Inventory Control Operations - The 10 Second Rule - Part 1

Retail Inventory control operations have been DataWorks'  focus for the past 24 years. We design systems to assist buyers in creating purchase orders; receivers to process packing slips, auditors to review costs, and controllers to generate accounts payable invoices and credit memos.

One of our design tenets is that user input time on heavily-used-forms is very expensive - so we try to spend our CPU coin wisely.  If we can shave a half a second off a process, that half second gets multiplied by all our end-users doing the same process every single day.  A billion here, a billion there, pretty soon it adds up to whole lot of time for running reports, re-ordering fast movers, or dialing in a pizza.

Notice that our tenet has a condition - "Heavily-Used-Forms". If a form is used to launch a one time process or it is a rarely used configuration option, we don't spend our R&D budget on making the form into a high performance, code-injected hot rod.

Speed to save and process a transaction is of extreme importance. If a transaction takes over 10 seconds to save then the end-user's cranium shifts into idle and the neurons start filling their synaptic gaps with sudoku puzzles and we fail in our efforts to get more data for the price of one transaction.

The receiving transaction is the core of our inventory control operations -  It has a lots of moving parts and it generates a lot of transactional heat. When the receiver clicks on the process button, he or she is kicking off a big assembly line of linear processes:

1. Accommodate Units of Measure, Currency Rates, Terms Discounts, Freight Charges, Cost Changes and Vendor Allowances
2. Consider the employee's access rights and privileges
3. Update Inventory Quantity On Hand, Quantity Received, and Status
4. Flag an Item for the need to update the Stock Ledger *
5. Update a Purchase Orders' Quantity On Order and Back Order Status
6. Calculate Base Cost, Net Cost, and Landed Cost
7. Update a log for any shifts in cost or retail
8. If merchandise price tags are needed, generate a Ticket Batch
9. If a Packing Slip, generate a General Ledger journal entry to book the Asset and PO-Clearing accounts
10. If an Invoice, generate an Accounts payable Invoice with the appropriate distributions.
11. If  allocating to more than one outlet, generate one or more Transfer-Outs.
12. If Transfers are set to process in one step versus two, process one or more Transfer-Ins.

The bad news is this  gymnastic routine takes much longer than 10 seconds to stick. With large receipts of over a 100 SKUs just the calculation of new costs take longer than 10 seconds to execute.

By the way, the one thing that does not occur here is a posting to our Daily Inventory Summary system. Notice the special * above. We set a flag but we don't do any actual work. The summary table is a daily stock ledger that is used to track various pieces of information such as beginning on hand, net sales, discounts, receipts, returns, markdowns and shrink. We decided it would take too long to update the core of our analytical system. And since the stock ledger is not a requirement for daily operations we reasoned that it could wait and run at a later time.

This is actually a clue to our design thinking. Operational events are linear and need to occur in the users'  time frame;  analysis and data crunching are not time sensitive.  Analysis can run a minute, a hour,  a day or even be regenerated a year from now.

So how can we speed up operations but deal will the need for real time information?

That will be the subject of our next post.