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.

Five New POS Interfaces in Development

Over the past 26 years we have authored numerous POS interfaces to our inventory back office software. The previous peak of our output  was in 1999, when we shipped four new POS interfaces. 1999 marked the near zenith of the the dot com bubble. I recall I was regularly talking to investors, venture capitalists, and  piloting a  leased airplane around the country. Times were good.

Y2K issues also peaked in 1999, so we got to ride the need for software that was  2000 savvy and replaced some systems that were stuck in 1999 land.

From 2000 - 2010 we typically had one or two new POS partners join us each year; however, during the last two years (read as "during the recession") we authored only one new interface - the two way integration to the Microsoft Dynamics RMS POS system.

During November 2010 the market moved and new partnership opportunities sprang forward. We currently have  FIVE new POS interfaces in development.

They are in alphabetical order:

1. Book4Time
2. MICROS,  Simphony 1.5
3. Squirrel Systems
4. Transaction Data Systems - Rx30
5. Vivonet - Halo

We welcome our new partnerships and look forward to a long relationship with each company.

As a measurement of economic health, I suggest that you add a new economic indicator  to your existing list that may have previously included such mundane items as: new housing starts, same-store sales, and weekly jobless claims. Add the DataWorks-POS-Work-in-Progress (DWPOSWIP for short) to your important economic metrics.

So,  is the recession over?  From our point of view -  YES!

High Tech Retail meets Low Tech Camping

Every year, our scout troop time travels back to 1830. We camp under white canvas, cook with cast iron, use candles and kerosene lanterns for illumination. We wear period appropriate clothing - includes shoes, socks and the all the rest. On every camp-out we take away the scout's cell phones, but on this particular camp out digital watches, clothes with zippers, butane lighters, nylon - anything pre-1830 is not allowed. The scouts are not suppose to be sending or receiving text messages. The scoutmaster is not blogging.

The idea is this: Learn history by living history.

At this particular camp-out we were encamped with other people from all over the world who are also living history too. That includes musicians, black smiths, and traders -- who peddler everything from buffalo pelts to leather making tools.

One of our scouts decided he needed a leather punch, but because he did not have the $8.00 for the tool, he stole it.

Now our business here at DataWorks, Inc. is inventory control. Loss prevention is part of our product offering. Physical inventory counts, and the tracking of shrinkage is a major part of what we do. We don't relish the fact that our software catches internal thieves, but we do. People have been caught and prosecuted based on our inventory system's controls and features.

So when I sensed that this scout was suddenly endowed with a tool that he should not have had my retail-shoplifting- radar pinged up on full alert.

It took the better part of a day to get the young man to confess to his crime, but he did. Restitution was made by returning to the trader's tent, admitting his crime, returning the slightly-used tool, plus repaying the  trader double his retail price - $16.00.

My logic was that while the item was out of inventory, he lost at least one sale, and he needed to be compensated for the lost revenue plus the loss of stock.

The trader accepted the apology, and then returned the tool and the additional $8.00 to the boy, with the statement, "It took a man to admit you were wrong, thank you for telling me. Here is your tool and the additional $8.00 back. Learn from this and don't ever do it again."

The scout thanked him. I thanked him. The matter was closed.

The value of the experience for me and the young man was that the ability to admit failure is a tough thing to do; but,  the ability to forgive is an even better trait to have in your personal inventory.

If you are interested in the campout regarding the where, the when and the how, that can be explored at this website.

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.

I asked my teen age children, and a number of adults who are NOT in the software business what they thought of the ads and they all thought the ads were excellent. No one had any negative take on it. Everyone saw it as a actor-reenactment spoof that was clever and funny.

So I am wrong, the time between inspiration and delivery was not 5 or 10 years. No one gave any thought to how long it took Microsoft to delivery the software. No one thought it took a long time. Time did not even enter into the advertised mind-set of my sampled audience.

So this is a case of sitting too close to the fire and getting my software marketing antennae scorched.

Probably because DataWorks' strives be to highly agile and capable of accelerating in a high G turn (See John Boyd) I took the Microsoft ad too personal. At DataWorks we have one major release a year. There are usually 4 or so incremental minor releases that address software bugs,  additional reports  or small feature tweaks.

Back  in December of 2008 I sent an email out to our end-users saying, "Hi, we are working on a new version, it's Christmas time,  and in the retail spirit of the season, what do you want gift wrapped into our inventory control software?". We got a lot of great responses. We organized the list, sorted it twice, scored everything with a strategic index (how many other users want this too?),  assigned developers with the tasks, and delivered the features in less than 12 months.

So in the spirit of NeXT-Was-My-Idea, here is a public thank you to a few  of you who asked for features and made NeXT® better:

1. To speed up Purchase Order input, define a Default Ship To Address within an Employee Access Group. From the 2008 DataWorks Users Conference Group Session.
2. Change the name of the PO Input from "Multiple" to "Pick List". Also make it the first choice in the drop down choice since it is the most popular. From the 2008 DataWorks Users Conference Group Session.
3. Search for a SKU that has been counted in a physical inventory.  From L. S.  at  Ripleys Entertainment.
4. Add a  field to the Vendor definition and allow me to define a vendor's federal tax id number. Include the field in an Account Payable export. From L.K.A. at Beaumont Hospital.
5. A report to list inventory items that have margins outside the normal parameters I have set up by category. From J.M. at Grand Casino Hinckley.
6. For Products with many colors and sizes, add an option to the purchase order system to show only the SKUs  that have been re-ordered. From J. McG. at Sea Island Company.
7. Give Sales Reports the ability to be run for a set of vendors. From D.U. at Ripleys Entertainment
8. Expand the Best Worst Reports to rank by product within Department; Product within Sub Department and by Product within Vendor. From D.U. at Ripleys Entertainment
9. Please add a way that we can scan our product's barcodes with a portable data collector and import them directly into a purchase order. From T.K at Via Christi.
10. Create a consolidated Manufacturer by Product by SKU Inventory report that focuses on recent ordering and receiving performance.  From J.W. at Jacksonville Zoo.
11. Best Worst Report with both Quantity Sold and Quantity On Hand Values, plus Percent of Totals. from S.W. at Ritz Carlton.
12. Comparative This Year to Date to Last Year to Date Sales report by Department. From L.S. at Ripleys Entertainment.
13. Create a forecast model that tracks and projects demand based on trailing 15-13  months (Q5) versus trailing 12-10 months (Q4) by Subclass.  R.T. at Pebble Beach.
14. Redesign the Quick Physical system so that is actually quick! From the entire audience at the the 2008 DataWorks Users Conference.
15. Create a faster way to input and cancel ticket batches. From  T.Van A. at LaPlaya Beach & Golf Resort.

Thanks for all of the ideas. These are just a few of the ideas the DataWorks community submitted and turned up in the release.    If you see your suggestion above and would like your name published - just let us know and we will give you proper credit.  You can read about all the enhancements by clicking here:  Version 6's Feature List.  Additionally  you can watch this recorded preview of the software.

If you have an idea for our next version, please feel free to add a comment here.  Keep the ideas coming and we will keep the code rolling. Together we design a better inventory back office system.

Inventory Control Response Times - DataWorks 3 / 6 Design Axiom

Way back in 2006 we did a major re-factoring of our inventory control application - NeXT®.  We took out stop watches and started charting all of our form's behaviors. We  focused on our Daily Maintenance and Transactional forms (read about those here).

DataWorks' 3/6 Design Axiom:

• Any user action (click of a button, etc) that takes over 3 seconds to complete must be accompanied with a thermometer, hour glass or status message that indicates the system is still working.
• The goal of all forms is that they display usable information to the end user within 3 seconds of a menu click.
• The maximum allowed time that a form can take to display is 6 seconds.
• A form that takes over 6 seconds to display, must be redesigned with less data or fewer controls until it takes 6 or less seconds to load.

It was while penning our newest amendment to our  design constitution - "The 10 Second Rule" that I remembered we had established this rule of 3's and 6's as an internal SOP within our R&D group. This axiom was adopted during the re-tooling of version 3 of NeXT. I think any application designer can use these as benchmarks to judge the  usability of their software.  Obviously, it would be better if everything was instantaneous - but in 2010 we sit upon a  hardware plateau that is unlikely to see any dynamic swing in productivity.

The outcome of our axiom was that slow, data-fat forms where refitted with hyperlinks to allow  loading and displaying of data on request rather than loading and displaying everything immediately. It made us think about the relevance of information. What was primary? What was secondary? I think it resulted in a cleaner look that allows for more intuitive data input and data mining.

The best example of this visual and data weight lost is NeXT''s general product form. Here are the  before and after photos.  The biggest difference is that the before image has 6 child views strung along the bottom of the form. By reducing it down to one grid with just SKU information we lost 10 seconds on the load of the form.

The speed up was not just from the data connection and query. It was also the reduction of the additional interface controls. Each control (page, grid, command button) has it's own load, initialization, and refresh events that eat up CPU cycles faster than my children eat Cinnamon Toast Crunch cereal. Every child page and grid we turned into a hyperlink shaved another half second from the form's fat load time.

The data is still available, but we added hyperlinks to get to that data. Green links lead you to  add, edit and delete record land. Blue links indicate there is read-only information ahead.

Retail Inventory Control Operations - The 10 Second Rule - Part 2

Our retail inventory control operations happen in the back office -  typically far away from the public eye.  The general public never sees our software in operation.  Our enterprise clients typically have buyers huddled as a corporate team and receivers staffed in one or more warehouses around the country. In single property operations, the store manager usually has their workstation in the midst of  the store's back stock where they do both the buying and the stocking for their outlet. DataWorks end-users  are behind the scenes,  making the decisions and preforming the prep work that enable all of the front of the house operations to work.  They decide on the right mix of merchandise, the proper merchandise presentation, the target margin, and when product needs to be marked down and moved out.

They also have a sense of how long something should take to accomplish.  In our last post I talked about how the receiving function is the most heavily used feature of our software. I said that we strive to live within a  10 second rule for our inventory transactions;  yet, I admitted that this function typically takes much longer than 10 seconds to process.

In our home we use to live by the "5 Second Rule".  If you drop something on the kitchen floor, and it has been there for less than 5 seconds you can plop it back on your plate, splash it into your bowl, or drop it into you mouth. More than 5 seconds? Meet Mr. Garbage Can.

We now have three reasons that make this rule obsolete:

1. Our 3 year old son is not fond of washing his hands.
2. Our maid is a Roomba robot who is long on determination, but short on suction.
3. We have Ringo - the pet ferret - who was last seen headed behind the dishwasher with a naked barbie doll clenched in his jaws.

So, if ANYTHING touches the kitchen floor in our home it is walking down the long dark hallway for an interview with the garbage can.

On the opposite side of this plate is my culinary rule when camping. If  dinner drops to the dirt, I give it a brush, blow on it once, then eat it up,  grime, grit and a grin - regardless of  elapsed contact time with terra firma.

A person's sense of cleanliness or sense of urgency depends a great deal about where they are.  The context of "where" determines our expectations on how long is too long.

Put another way: walking down a dark alley is not the same as a stroll in the park.

Now that I have wandered off  topic and stumbled over my metaphors, it is time to loop back and pick up the post where I dropped my chain of thought...

Our inventory control operations happen in the back office, far away from the glare of the public.  But our point of sale partners are right out there in the public's line of fire.  When one of our bar-codes is scanned, the price is expected to "instantly" appear.  When the sale is totaled we  expect the tax  to "instantly" appear.

Besides being done in front of the public, the point of sale transactions has some other special distinctions about the end of the transaction that separate it from the completion of other inventory control operations. The point of sale transaction has one or more connections to mechanical devices that can mask the time it takes to save the transaction.

1. Printing of the sales receipt can mask the time to save the transaction to the database back-end.
2. Popping the cash drawer will absorb a second or two of transaction time.
3. Rolling coins down an automatic change dispenser chute will amuse patrons,  keep the cashiers hands clean, and certainly hide any digital needs with analog springs.
4. The prompting of a signature or the requirement of a PIN input by the customer puts a great deal of slack time into the transaction.
5. Verification of ID, with the inspection of a Driver License Number or Phone Number eat up enormous amounts of CPU clock cycles
6. The Credit Card authorization can absorb any residual transactional latency.

The credit card authorization really is a separate financial subroutine event that happens outside the inventory control transaction, but it holds the final keys to locking the transaction down.  When the credit card is swiped we expect the approval to occur in -- what?  Two seconds?  Five seconds? Ten Seconds?

My experience is that when any sales transaction takes over five seconds (credit card or no credit card) the clerk will utter the universal face saving, "the system has been slow all day" disclaimer. (The exception to this is the patient staff manning AT&T cell phone stores, their transactions always take somewhere north of  30 seconds - and they never blink until the 45 second mark is passed)

When the credit card authorization subroutine takes more than 10 seconds, I start fanning my wallet,  looking for cash or alternate slices of plastic because I figure that the credit card processing company is about to bingo my card - a big blue banner of  broadcasted unhappiness is about to scroll across the Verifone's display.

Exception to the anxiety index?  Black Friday or Christmas Eve - I expect to wait for the authorization subroutine to complete and the delay will always be the result of the extra demand being pushed into the system - it is never my problem on those days.

Consider this - our retail inventory control operations typically occur as solo events --  no one is around to share the moment with, no one else can hear the  "this takes too long" statement. Additionally,  there are no mechanical contraptions to print, pop, roll, amuse or distract us from the event. All we offer are thermometer bars that mark time to the rhythm of the saving records. With the lack of distraction,  I believe our inventory control transactions seem to take longer than point of sales transactions even when they take the same amount of time. Of course how many 100 line item POS transactions have you ever heard of?

Having just said that, I remember that back in the late 1980s and throughout the 1990's our SCO Xenix and MS-DOS applications were designed to begin a print job  immediately on the save of a transaction. As soon as the receiving event was told to process we would start printing out a "report" that would document the event for accounting and paper back up. The first step of our transaction would be to dump the contents of the transaction out to a Dot Matrix Printer.  The print command would take a half a second or two to push, and once completed we could continue with the work of quantity, cost, retail and accounting updates. The printer would take a good 30 -60 seconds to weave fan fold paper under its 32 character per second print head and when the printer ejected the paper up to the rip line, the transactional data was safely saved and waiting for the next transaction to begin.

We now design our back office inventory control operations to only print on demand. A document that can be printed to the screen, or emailed to a department, or published as a PDF file has taken away our ability to hide the transaction's save in the shadow of the printer. Plus we feel pretty good about our green policy and the fact that we are saving acres of pine forests from being bound into journals full of DataWorks documents.

Having just pulled those two decade memories up to my frontal lobe, it might be possible to design the receiving transaction to spool up the bar-code ticket printer at the beginning of the transaction with the need for hang tags or adhesive sticker stock.

I have done a fair bit of political back peddling on this post.  I declare that we have a 10 Second Rule and then do a great deal of mental pondering on modifiers to the rule. The 10 Second Rule is a design goal.  Whenever I hear there is a "Rule" in computer programming,  I start toward the fire exit,  looking to protect myself with a new software vendor. Rules are created by programmers, designers or companies who have either a mental block, a framework restriction or a language weakness that is preventing them from doing something better.

Hopefully,  I have painted a picture that our inventory processing time is indeed relative to the where and when it occurs. Both the "where" and the "when" have something to do with our sense of urgency and our expectations on system performance. The next post will be "when" you will not have to wait any longer on how DataWorks will deal with transactions that do take over 10 seconds.

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.