Using Bar Code Scanners
Bar code scanners can save labor in many situations. Checking in deliveries is much faster and more accurate than counting items by hand. You merely pick up an item, pass it in front of a scanner and put it into a tub to be shelved. Taking inventory also is much quicker and more accurate with a bar code scanner. You merely pick up items from the shelf, pass them in front of a scanner and put them back on the shelf.
I was interested in how automotive mass retailers sell with bar code scanners. The employees working the counter look up the parts using electronic cataloging on their Store POS System. Once they find the part, the employee goes to the shelf and picks up the part. The customer looks at the part and makes a decision whether to buy the part or not. Assuming the customer chooses to buy the part, it is put on a sell shelf and sold by a cashier using a bar code scanner. This guarantees that the part going out the door is the same part as is on the invoice. If the employee grabbed the wrong part by mistake the customer may be annoyed, but at least the Store POS System's inventory is correct. Contrast this with how many parts stores sell the same part. When they look up the part with their electronic cataloging, the Store POS System usually makes it convenient to put the part directly onto an invoice. If the employee picks up the wrong part by mistake not only is the customer annoyed, there are two mistakes in the Store POS System's inventory. One might think about using a system that is similar to that used by the automotive mass retailers.
Labels: Bar Code scanners, counting newly delivered stock, Store POS System, taking inventory
Computer System for Warehouse with Captive Stores
This option of MIB was written in 1985 for a Midwest warehouse that has 23 captive stores. It was meant to be a simple inexpensive system and it continues to be that even today. I doubt that they spend $100 per store per year for support and hardware maintenance. Here a captive store means that the warehouse owns the stores. Each of the stores and the warehouse has their own computer. The stores are responsible for invoicing, received on accounts and reconciling the finish day reports with the daily deposits. The warehouse is responsible for daily stock orders, pricing the inventory, tracking interstore transfers, authorizing charge customers and mailing charge statements.
Interstore transfers are an important part of this business for a couple of reasons. First, the trucks delivering the daily stock orders travel the same route making the deliveries and on the return home. This means that a truck can pick up a part at one store and deliver it to another for minimal cost. This allows these stores in rural areas, in most cases, to have a needed part within a few hours rather than over night. Second, slow moving parts are kept in stores rather than in the warehouse. Thus, there is some chance that it can be sold directly from the store but for sure it can be moved from one store to another in at most one day and most of the time within a few hours.
The routine for daily stock orders is a two step process.
Step 1. The warehouse manager connects to the stores one at a time. He first down loads a file with any interstore transfers. He then has the store computer run a stock order. These two steps take a few seconds. He then disconnects from the store and connects to the next store and repeats the same steps.
Step 2. After he has connected to all of the stores, the manager starts connecting to the stores again one at a time. He down loads the store stock order into the warehouse computer and immediately prints an invoice for the stock order. Once the invoice is printed, the system creates a posting file for the store. The posting file and any interstore transfers from Step 1 are posted into the store. This completes the computer part of the daily stock order.
I was amazed that the warehouse manager posts the order to the store before the stock is pulled. However, the manager assured me that it is rare that when the computer says that they have a part, that they don't have it. Even then most of the time the error was because the part was put on the wrong shelf when it was originally delivered from the manufacturer. The error is usually corrected within hours and the part is delivered to the store the following day.
Labels: Auto Parts Warehouse, Captive Stores, Store POS System
Avoiding Computer Viruses On Your Store POS System
It seems as though if somebody uses the internet for finding parts or any other application, sooner or later they are going to get a computer virus. I myself misspelled the name of a web site a few years ago. Immediately, a porno site flashed on the screen and my antivirus program started screaming at me to shut down the internet connection because I was being attacked by a virus. I turned off the power on the computer but had visions of losing all of my information on that computer. I was lucky that time because the antivirus program worked that time. Another instance a few years later and it did not work. A while back I remember reading that somebody hacked into a Microsoft web site in South Korea. It seems to me that if Billy Gates can't protect his own web site, the rest of us are vulnerable. The only way to be safe is to not use your computer on the internet. We at MIB use that notion to take a slightly different path to internet security. We strongly recommend to our customers that their Store POS System's server is never used on the internet. However, each of their MIB work stations can do double duty as an MIB work station and have internet access. Moreover, the MIB work stations communicate with the server via serial connections. This means that a virus that reaches a work station can't infect the server. The worst case is that a work station is infected. In that case you merely reformat the hard drive on the work station and reinstall the operating system. No important information is lost and the only inconvenience is losing use of a work station for roughly an hour.
Labels: Computer Virus, Internet Access, Store POS System
