The truck unloads at six, the document stays on the counter
The supplier delivers, leaves the delivery note (DDT), and someone drops it on top of the pile with the others, then the shop opens and from that moment the day belongs to the customers, to the shelves that need filling and to whoever is missing on the tills
Meanwhile the pile grows, and in the evening a tired person enters it line by line into the store's business software, or enters it tomorrow, along with tomorrow's pile
The hours that disappear in the back room
It isn't the shop work, you know how to do that and it pays you, it's the steps around it, always the same ones, that nobody can skip
- The supplier orders, a hundred of them, and nearly always the same items in different quantities
- The delivery notes to enter one by one, with codes that every supplier writes its own way
- The supplier portals to open to pick up documents, price lists and order confirmations
- The promotions and the price changes to enter before they go live
- The comparison between what you ordered, what turned up and what they invoice you for, when there's time
That «when there's time» is the line that costs the most, because there's hardly ever any time
The three numbers that ought to match
You ordered twenty cases, eighteen turned up, the invoice counts twenty, and nobody sees the difference, because to see it you have to put three documents on the same table and read them line by line all the way down
That's margin walking out quietly, two cases at a time, and quietly is worse than a big mistake, because a big mistake catches your eye and this one doesn't
It's also the kind of work where a person skips a number at line two hundred, and it's normal that it happens, while a machine reads line two hundred the same way it read the first
A wrong price shows up at the till
A promotion entered badly doesn't stay a back office problem, it reaches the tills within half an hour, with the customer who saw the leaflet and the cashier calling someone from the back room
Price changes are mechanical work with immediate consequences, and they're exactly the kind of step worth taking out of the hands of someone who already has twenty things to do
Examples of what the system can do
These are examples of jobs the system can do, not jobs already delivered for some store, Muffin Suite started recently and I'd rather write it here than let you find out later
- The system reads the delivery note, even when it arrives as a PDF or by email, recognizes the items and posts the goods receipt into the store's business software following the rules you give it
- It compares order, delivery note and invoice line by line, and sets aside only the lines where the numbers don't add up, so instead of rereading everything you look only at those
- It logs into the suppliers' portals with your credentials, collects confirmations and documents and files them with the name and the folder you already use
- It prepares the replenishment order starting from your own criteria, and leaves it ready for a person to look at and send
- It carries the price changes of a promotion from the sheet you're sent over to the item records, and flags the ones it can't find
If your program has no technical integration to the outside world it makes little difference, the system uses the screens the way an operator would, and it's the house specialty, and the same goes for the supplier portals you log into with a browser
What stays with you
The decisions stay yours, what to order, who to negotiate with, how much to keep on the shelf, the system does the mechanical steps and stops where a head is needed
A new document or a line that doesn't add up it doesn't make up, it sets them aside and shows them to you, and how much autonomy to give it is your choice, at the start it's worth keeping it on a short rein and widening it on the cases you have seen work
Why the shop comes out ahead
The hours that today go into data entry and checks come back free, and you use them for the shop or for getting home at a normal hour, without putting another person on typing delivery notes
Then there's the part you see at the end of the year, the checks done on every line and not only when there's time, if you want an idea of the numbers there's the savings calculation, it takes you two minutes
You don't have to replace your software, the system uses what you already have, and I tell you the monthly fee before we start, that figure stays and you approve every addition yourself, if you like show me a procedure, a short screen recording is enough