Spedi Retail Software - EPOS for the convenience sector

Is Your Shop Thriving, Or Does It Look More Like A Museum Than A Shop?

Sunday 21st March 2010

If you do not know the answer to this question, you are almost certainly running a "museum" - and you are not "leveraging your assets" to their best advantage

Few experiences are more depressing than entering a shop where the owner does not understand the difference between a shop and a museum. Because of the very nature of a museum, it is normal for the displays to be changed only infrequently. The public expect to be able to see many of the same exhibits every time they visit. Some changes are, of course, necessary. The British Museum, for example, has such a vast collection that only part of it can be on public view at any one time.

A shop is completely different. If certain items fail to sell within a reasonable timeframe, the wise owner will notice and will weed them out - and use the space they formerly occupied for other items which, hopefully, his customers will want to buy.

The difficulty is finding out what items are not selling sufficiently well and, therefore, do not justify their (expensive) space on the shelf.

A typical small retail grocery store stocks between 3500 and 5000 different lines. It is entirely unreasonable for anyone to imagine that they can possibly know how well every one of these lines is selling - other than by inspecting the thickness of dust gathering on them! This is one of the areas where a good EPoS system can really pay dividends.

With a scanning EPoS system, the tills record details of each product sold. The backoffice management programs can then be used to answer questions such as "On average, how many of a certain product do I sell
each week?" and "How long ago did anyone actually buy a particular product?". The better systems can also produce reports showing how sales patterns change over time - for instance, sales of soup rising during the colder weather and soft drinks during warmer weather. They can even produce "Sales by Hour" information, which can be used to decide whether the current staffing levels are appropriate and whether trading hours should be extended, or even shortened on certain days.

Without a good scanning EPoS system, it is surprisingly easy to allow a thriving shop to slide and start bearing more than passing resemblance to a museum. On the other hand, with the help of a good EPoS system, it is surprisingly easy to keep a shop thriving - and even expand into additional outlets in nearby areas.

Brands Matter!

Sunday 14th March 2010

Owners of brand names, particularly the better-known ones, tend to protect them with an almost religious degree of fervour

Why do they bother? After all, surely it is the product that matters rather than the name printed on the label? Clever Marketing Departments, however, strive to create an image for the brand which has more to do with promoting its desirability rather than the technical merits of the products.

Manufacturers of fashion clothing are particularly expert at this. The glamorous image of brands such as "Calvin Klein", "Dolce & Gabbana", "Diesel" and "Tommy Hilfiger" has nothing to do with their quality. This is, of course, not a problem, since fashions change so rapidly that the items will be out-of-fashion (and thus lose their status) long before they wear out.

It is a different matter where business-critical products are concerned. Here, quality is everything, in spite of what those clever Marketing Departments would have customers believe.

IBM, for example, has a well-deserved and almost unrivalled reputation for making quality equipment. There is a saying "Noone ever got fired for buying IBM". Open up a cheap PC or server case and you had better watch out for the razor-sharp edges, never mind the difficulty of accessing the various components. IBM, however, round off the hand-slashing edges and make it easy to remove or replace the internal parts. There are consequences, of course. One is that the IBM equipment will usually be heavier, sometimes considerably so. Another is that it tends to last rather longer. The third consequence is that it will be more expensive.

Unfortunately, quality is never cheap. Equally unfortunately, a higher price does not necessarily guarantee higher quality. "Let the buyer beware" may be a somewhat hackneyed phrase, but it is just as true nowadays as it always has been.

How Do You Know That I Am REALLY Who I Claim To Be?

Sunday 7th March 2010

Impersonation comes in many forms

Actors, after all, are basically impersonators, in that they are pretending to be someone else. However, this is perfectly acceptable because we all understand that they are portraying a character purely for entertainment purposes. On the other hand, impersonation may be used for malicious purposes. The doorstep caller pretending that "he has come to read the gas/electricity meter", "he needs to check the water pipes", "he is a Council Inspector checking something-or-other" etc etc all fall into this category. Having gained access, the bogus caller will endeavour to steal any items of value he can find. Modern variations on this technique include the telephone caller purporting to be from "the Bank" and, on the pretext of some security problem or other, requesting account details and passwords. The well-known email "phishing" scams use a similar technique. before the rise in popularity of email, letters were also a popular medium for this type of crime.

There is only one way to be sure that any form of communication, whether by email, telephone or letter, is indeed genuine. It is to obtain verification from a known and trusted source, not the email address, telephone number or postal address in the communication. Send an email, make a telephone call or write to a known and trusted destination, not using any of the contact details so thoughtfully provided in the suspect email, telephone call or letter etc.

Until broadband becaome readily available, remote network access was typically provided by a dial-up modem connection. In order to increase security, the connection software would normally be configured as
"dial-back". The network server would answering an incoming call, verify the username and password, then drop the line. It would then call back the remote user's system at a predefined telephone number. This ensured that, even if the username and password were to be compromised, no security breach would occur.

This, of course, is merely the principle of "By default, trust noone", on which all security measures should be founded.

Everyone Should Have Time For NTP

Sunday 28th February 2010

It is another of those "little things that make a big difference, but without making any fuss about it"

Have you ever wondered how that useful little clock on your computer screen manages to keep such good time?

Well, one of the unsung heroes of the Internet is actually doing all the hard work for you. Modern operating systems, whether Windows, Linux or Mac OS/X, all enable users to specify the global region in which they are operating. Provided that the correct region is selected, the PC will normally display the correct local time on the screen to a high degree of accuracy - and will also automatically make the twice-yearly corrections for British Summer Time (or, as our friends across the pond call it, "Daylight Saving Time".

Accurate timekeeping on a computer system is little more than a "nice to have" feature on a standalone PC. After all, everyone normally has ready access to a wristwatch or several perfectly good clocks. However, once a PC joins a network, it becoms a potential target for unauthorised and, quite often, malicious attempts to access the information it contains or to use the facilities it can provide.

A criminal will always try to delay detection of his activities for as long as possible, giving him more opportunity to profit from his acts as well as making it easier for him to avoid being caught. In a large network, the various routers and switches etc. constantly log details of their activities, usually to a central server. This information is useful for ensuring that the network is performing to specification and is not being placed under undue strain. It can also be used to detect any unauthorised or even malicious activity. If the date and time stamps on these log details are not reliable, the Network Administrator's task becomes considerably more difficult. Accurate timekeeping for every router, switch and PC on the network is therefore essential.

Fortunately, this otherwise herculean task can be performed simply and unobtrusively by NTP, the Network Time Protocol. Larger networks may be able to justify having their own NTP server, typically synchronising it with one of the global radio time signal transmitters or even their own, private atomic clock. Smaller networks are more likely to use one of the public time servers, such as "time.nist.gov", "tock.usno.navy.mil" or Windows' default time server at "time.windows.com". If necessary, a secure version of NTP is also available. This enables the server to authenticate itself to the client and for the data to be exchanged in a tamper-proof manner.

In most situations, the "WHETHER" of accurate timekeeping on the router, switch or PC etc. is far more important than the "HOW".

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