This story also appears in Communications News magazine ("Just-in-time is in fashion").
Doing Business In Style
Profiting from real-world, real-time inventory management.
Inventory management can make or break any retail business and there is no tougher place in retail than the fashion industry. Whether it’s clothing or shoes, the typical purchasing cycle involves buying inventory six months in advance of the actual selling season. With little opportunity for reordering once the season arrives and the knowledge that inventory ages on a weekly - if not daily - basis, inventory management is a critical component for success.
Houser Shoes, a regional shoe store chain with retail locations in Tennessee, West Virginia and the Carolinas, not only faces the challenge of managing its inventory relative to seasonality and style, but also relative to the purchasing patterns and demographics of specific store locations.
Through the efforts of several companies and their products services, Houser Shoes has made real-time inventory management into a competitive advantage through the daily shifting of inventory between locations and real-time sales pricing against inventory trends.
The basics of this system are simple and begin with daily midnight polling of all point of sale (POS) data from each register in each store. Polling is driven by the headquarters’ AS/400 midrange computer in Asheville, NC, and conducted automatically by a combination of CQ-3780® terminal emulation software provided by Atlanta-based CQ Computer Communications, Inc. (www.cq-comm.com) and external Hayes™ OPTIMA™ modems with the AutoSync™ 2 feature provided by Boston-based Zoom® Telephonics, Inc (www.hayesmicro.com). The CQ/Hayes solution runs unattended on each stores’ PC that functions as a POS register.
During the night, data consolidation is completed and verified with check verification and inventory control applications. This results in a set of daily inventory reports in Asheville every morning. During the day, messages such as requests for transfers to and from stores, items to be put on sale, or price changes are transmitted from the Asheville office staff to personnel in the stores, and vice versa, and are stored in the computer during the day. All this work gets updated and transmitted to the stores during the night. Headquarters, in turn, receives their messages and sales information for that day.
Jim Denton, President of J.C. Denton Associates, Inc., was the systems integrator for Houser Shoes. Denton reports that considerable time was spent in adjusting the dial-up timing and optimization with the remote dial-up units. He states that "the combined operations of the CQ communications software along with the Hayes OPTIMA modem’s ability to work on a standard PC with no special synchronous equipment are what actually make this dial-up communication scenario possible."
The absolute key to the success of this inventory management system is total reliability. Here’s what Gary Houser, President, Houser Shoes says. "With our old system, we had many problems with communications in polling the stores. Every day, we had to manually poll the stores. It was a nightmare. Since Jim Denton installed our present system, reliability has been almost 100% each night. We get information from all our stores, on time, every day. This means increased efficiency and financial savings."
The end result of this work is an autonomous dial-up network that runs unattended and is therefore largely invisible to the store employees. The solution enables Houser Shoes to implement accurate and reliable real-time inventory management - all while DOING BUSINESS IN STYLE.
For more information on this 3780 solution or any of CQ’s other connectivity solutions, contact CQ Computer Communications at 770-844-0233. You can also contact CQ at email@cq-comm.com or visit CQ’s web site at http://www.cq-comm.com.
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