Kwik Mart Upgrades their Point of Sale for Liquor Stores

Los Angeles Canoga Park
Locations 2

Kwik Mart is a liquor store min-mart that has been open for more than 5 years. It was recently purchased and the new owner met with one of our resellers for Surveillance. They recently purchased a new location and needed a Surveillance and a Point of Sale system. They wanted to move on from their current system, but in order to do that, they need answers to these questions they had:

The owner is looking to purchase more locations after this one. He needed a way to keep track of multiple locations, and manage the system with common practices and control. He determined these features were required:

• employee oversight,
• inventory management,
• easy to use easy to train staff

How you can have a Multi Site POS solution that's Easy for your Staff:

The new owner had an existing POS that was easy for the Staff. But for a multi site, the owner and his staff had been unsure of how to implement this. They had major issues with their current system, but they saw only one real problem at first: their current system had around 8,000 items in it, they needed a way to migrate that data to their new location. They didn't want to spend two months scanning items into their system.

When your business grows do you know how to stay in control? These solutions help Keep you on Track:

They were growing but their POS System wasn't. The older system had several drawbacks. It used a Microsoft Access Database, which they couldn’t use across the internet or VPN. Pulling reports had also slowed since Access databases slows with the amount of information stored in them. They wanted new features, they wanted more oversight of employees. They had two locations now, so having the same software didn't yield the same oversight they needed. They wanted to transfer inventory between stores. Their requirements list was very extensive, and and their software feature list seem too short to answer their needs.

When your company grows, will your POS System help grow it, or strangle it? CCS has a path for you.

The mart didn’t see that upgrading the software through the original company would give them the answers to their requirements. They felt they were in a pickle; they needed to upgrade their Point of Sale, but the work to do so would put them back behind schedule. The needed the oversight soon. But rushing to a decision might put them same position 5 years from now.

They kept consulting with different POS vendors. They spent time with our reseller to find out about their standards and business practices. During this process they would find Cafe Cartel Systems know: Point of Sale isn't about doing work, it's about automating work. They found CCS has a record of product development, and growth in the industry.

Do you want one simple tool that will give you an easy Point of Sale upgrade?

Kwik Mart needed one thing first, easy importing. This is a common problem in the industry, and there's not many solutions, but CCS has one. So when Kwik Mart said, we still dont' know how to get the items to our new system without a month or two of work. Our reseller had an answer: Café Cartel’s POS has an Import Tool.

Our reseller had used this tool for other retail stores. What it does is to take excel or csv files, that the customers can usually generate from their own lists, and the tool will import them into the SQL Server 2000 or SQL Server 20005 Database that Café Cartel’s POS Software uses.

Using this tool our reseller has installed CCS POS at many retail style operations: department stores, pet stores, and simple dollar stores. This tool will import the data, and it will create vendors, products, sizes and taxes as they are imported. There’s more the import can do, for example: when a store like Kwik Mart is provided their purchase orders in electronic format, they can import the file into CCS as purchase order. This makes purchasing management a breeze.

In the past our reseller’s customers have used lists to update their inventory, and product information. This is usually acceptable. The Kwik Mart didn't have CSV or Excel. They had a Microsoft Access database.

Our reseller contacted CCS to export the needed information from the Microsoft Access Database:

• Product,
• Vendor,
• Manufacturer,
• Sizes,
• Client Contacts,
• Taxes

Because we work closely with our resellers, and customers; this is part of our standard contract with them. Therefore CCS was easily able to convert the information.

If your POS has countless Data Entry Errors, Here’s how you Fix Thousands of Errors:

We improved the quality of the database data; this was a unexpected result for them. Lets take a look at what that means.

Do you have good point of sale information after 5 years?

Imagine your own employees, do they follow “Common Practices.” Do you have a training manual a method for all the standard procedures your company does; do you make sure your employees really follow it? Well at Kwik Mart, which is like a lot of smaller multi-store Liquor Stores, they weren’t absolute in their following of “Common Practices”.

In their old point of sale software, they had a size field and a name field for each item. But not all users would enter the size in the size field. When we did a cursory analysis of their inventory list, they had three major problems. First, often the size would be at the end of the item name field. Second, the size would often be spelled different, such as 750ml or 750m. And third, we also found a variety of indecision in capitalizing words. Sometimes Absolut vodka was spelled “absolut”, or “Absolut vanilla.” We didn’t feel this was acceptable to provide a new customer with such indiscriminate results. We had to do something about this. Their problem was now exposed. Other Point of Sale companies they met with would say, you will have to scan and enter these items by hand. The following is in part, one of our defining differences.

Do you have a problem to Solve Now? Will your POS vendor solve your special request?

CCS has been working with complex databases for over 10 years. From Retail, Restaurants, Medical Facilities, we’ve seen a lot of bad information, and have had to help correct it. Since we have worked with such a variety of systems, we were able to quickly generate an algorithm.

This algorithm corrected capitalization, it parsed (or separated) and corrected the items names and updated the items size. We also corrected the size list, so they all matched in spelling. This really turned out to be a crucial change, because size is very important when analyzing statistics of client purchasing and inventory re-orders. They had not expected they would get this information back: better ordered and structured. They could leave their Microsoft Access database in the dust, and move onto Microsoft SQL Server. This new solution gave them internet VPN capability and greater oversight. They were weeks ahead of schedule, on the install. But the real end is, they were months ahead of upgrading their Point of Sale. Having done their research, they got the features they needed, and more.