Tag Archives: Elizabeth Wasserman

About 1452 days ago E-Commerce

Tech Talk: Florist Switches Payment Platform

KaBloom is a Massachusetts-based online florist in business since 1998 that has a patented technique for shipping fresh-cut flowers in water overnight. The company found that sales increased dramatically after switching to a new online payment platform that allowed the firm to better communicate with customers and allowed customers to more easily process payments, CEO David Hartstein tells IncTechnology.com. Elizabeth Wasserman: You have a patented system for sending fresh flowers in water to customers over night. How did that impact your technology decisions? David Hartstein: We’ve been in business since 1998 and our business has gone through different cycles. Today we have over 30 stores but our business model right now is focused on mainly selling online at KaBloom.com. The majority of our stores are in Massachusetts. We also have stores in Chicago and Florida. But we deliver nationally. Fresh cut flowers that are delivered over night are usually delivered by FedEx without water. When you go through the rigorous distribution and logistics within FedEx, you can not pack flowers in water. Think about taking a bottle of water and putting stems inside. If this ends up on its side or upside down, the water will be all over the place. We have a patented technique where we are the only one in the world that can ship fresh flowers in water via FedEx. Our flowers can be in any position, upside down and sideways, and no water will spill. When we started offering this to customers, we needed a new platform, a new way to communicate with our customer and tell them about what we do, what we have, and why we are different. Wasserman: What did you decide to do? Hartstein: We decided to implement a new payment platform called whizPay mainly because it provides reliability and ease of use. It provides a very easy customer checkout process. The back office that we have with it has very rich functions. It assists us with product description, with the content, with our stores and our stores managing platforms. Each store has the ability to manage their orders. It’s a central platform that they can access from different locations. They get a notification when an order comes in for them. They have the ability to log in to the main platform, communicate with the customer, change the order, change the address. Without having to have an administrator do it for them. Wasserman: At the same time, does it protect your data? Hartstein: It’s all secure. There is information that can only be managed by the administration and not by each store.  They can not delete a customer’s information. There are other benefits, too. For example, say we have a store in Virginia. That store knows their customer base and knows what the customer likes. They have the ability to display the designs that their customer likes so that when the customer orders a certain design, the system knows to go to that store to deliver that product. We have the ability to say that product X can only be delivered from Y location. Wasserman: What it easy to implement? Hartstein: It was easy — as far as anything in technology is easy. We launched Sept. 1, 2008 and we never had to during that process shut our site down and bring other alternatives online. There are always hiccups but we’ve never had issues. Wasserman: What results have you seen? Hartstein: Since February of this year, we have seen an increase of about 50 percent in orders through the new platform. That is quite astonishing in this market. There are two reasons for this. First, we have a product we sell that no one else sells and that is that we are the only one can deliver flowers in water from coast to coast over night. Second, our management function within our platform allows us to communicate with our customers in a much easier way.

About 1483 days ago Business Software

Tech Talk: PR Firm Succeeds with Dashboard

Tech Image, a Chicago-area public relations business that launched in 1993, wanted to show clients that their PR campaigns were producing results. Mike Nikolich, president and CEO, tells IncTechnology.com that deploying a business intelligence dashboard enabled clients to access data that shows key performance indicators for media coverage, impact, quality, content and budget to measure the success of PR campaigns. Elizabeth Wasserman: What problems in your company did you want to resolve with business intelligence? Mike Nikolich: In public relations, one of the biggest things PR people are trying to justify is net worth of their campaigns. Are they working? What metrics can you put in place to show they’re working? A lot of the metrics out there are fuzzy, they measure ad equivalency, count up placements, and assign ad value to results. It’s black magic and voodoo. And when you get into tight economic periods, fuzzy metrics don’t cut the mustard. We were looking for a way that would prove that if you had to cut the PR budget, the company would feel the pain. We wanted to prove that you can measure the effectiveness of PR campaigns. Our philosophy is to try to align PR with sales. Most of our companies range in size from $25 million in annual sales up to several billion in annual sales. Typically these companies have very small marketing PR departments. If they have PR professionals on staff, maybe they have just one. Many times we’re viewed as an adjunct to these companies. We figured out after the first economic downturn in 2001 that the companies that really valued what we were providing kept their budget intact and we tried to figure out how do we measure this? Wasserman: What seemed like the best technology solution? Nikolich: Everything we looked at was so expensive we couldn’t justify it, in terms of commercial off-the-shelf solutions that had a big, 360-degree focus. Our clients could not justify making a six-figure annual investment to justify a budget that was maybe twice as large as that. Our typical budgets are $100,000 to a quarter of a million dollars. We knew they would love a solution, but the question was whether they would pay for it. What happened is we were pitching a prospect, iDashboards, a technology company offering a business intelligence dashboard solution tied more to sales professionals and manufacturing. When we went through due diligence on this company and dug into this dashboard solution, we realized that we could probably adapt this to our PR framework. What’s been interesting is that we’ve become one of their best case studies, although they’re not a client of ours. Wasserman: How did you make this fit your business? Nikolich: We had to adapt it to our business. This is a dashboard solution that’s intended to integrate sophisticated databases, CRM, manufacturing solutions. We had to dumb down the technology and make it work for our needs. What we did was figure out from clients what was going to be important to them. That was sort of like going to a buffet table and picking out a little of this and a little of that. In our attempt to measure the effectiveness of these programs, it was a really interesting, organic learning process. We put a team together, attended seminars, read books, and talked to sales people. We put a prototype together for clients. Once we had this up and running and showed it to clients, all of a sudden they wanted it. They had to see how they could actually use the data first. Wasserman: What have the results been? Nikolich: We currently have 15 different clients running dashboards. Every client is a little different. Some of the key performance indicators we put together compare coverage, maybe to a competitor or the previous year. We might want to take a look at the type of coverage we’re getting. For some of our clients, product reviews are essential. You can make or break a product with a positive or negative review. We have clients for whom 90 percent of what we do is manage the product review process. You can look at coverage by story theme or key messages getting out there. You can look at the impact of those things, are these campaigns generating meaningful Web traffic? Are leads getting generated from this? Is the client repurposing the articles? If you can mine the data and apply it back to these dashboards, and have incredibly talented people who can use the measurement tools to spot trends, you have the opportunity to see what’s working and what’s not. If you’re doing a crummy job, it’s going to show it. But if your campaign is effective, it’s also going to show it.

About 1483 days ago Business Software

Tech Talk: Deaf Provider Scales with Platform

Viable, a Rockville, Md. provider of next-generation video relay and videoconferencing services and products for the deaf and hard-of-hearing, upgraded to a new enterprise platform, which enabled the business to add a new call center every month and provide remote management across worldwide locations. Jason Yeh, vice president of technology, tells IncTechnology.com that the business was outgrowing its previous technology solution and needed a more scalable platform to support expansion. Elizabeth Wasserman: Tell us about your business. Jason Yeh: Viable is a community video-relay service provider, a company that provides interpreting communications services for the deaf and hard-of-hearing, enables the deaf to make video phone relay calls through an interpreter and through videoconferencing solutions, and provide hardware and software video phone equipment that enable people to communicate through our video relay services. We have more than 250 employees and we were founded in 2005. Most of our executive team and management are deaf or hard-of-hearing. Because we are the market, we understand who the target market is and understand the value and importance of communication. Wasserman: How quickly was your company growing and what did that do to your technology needs? Yeh: We’re only four years old. We’re a very young company that started to grow incredibly fast and we encountered a lot of computer management and growth issues and challenges. One was call center expansion across the United States. We needed to have the capability of establishing a functional call center in a short amount of time. So after we decide on a location, we had a very short time in order to get it up and running and functional. That presented a challenge to our IT team, in terms of setting up the network infrastructure and all the IT side. One of the challenges was setting up all the equipment, workstations, etc. to ensure that everything was operationally stable. The installation of all our applications in all the call centers took so much time and manpower and support for troubleshooting small detail items to get the call center up and running. Another issue we faced was that as we grew out infrastructure and data centers had more capability and that meant we needed more hardware, server equipment, and so on to handle a lot of data with streaming video. We now have more than five data centers around the U.S. and that required more server set up, more travel and higher expenses. Wasserman: What made you decide to change your enterprise platform? Yeh: Our business was growing so fast. Just in the last couple of years from 2007-08, we’ve tripled in size. We needed to have an enterprise system capable of providing us a faster recovery, quicker set up, and to ensure our set up time was as short as possible to aid us in getting us in getting call centers up and running. We were able to set up an imaging system where we replicate the installation and integrate our platform and it would help us go much faster. What we have is ZENworks Configuration Manager from Novell. That’s helped us deal with patch management, deployment, systems installation, and the set up and remote management of more than 100 workstations. Moving to an enterprise solution has allowed us to reduce our setup time in call centers by 80 percent and it saved us costs as well — well over 50 percent of the transportation and labor costs. Before, we did not have an enterprise system. We were just running business operations on several different home-grown applications that fit specific needs. Wasserman: When did you upgrade and what results have you seen? Yeh: In September 2008 was when we did the initial move to the enterprise solution. It allowed us to reduce our set up time in call centers by 50 percent and it saved us costs as well — well over 50 percent of the costs. That’s because we don’t have to constantly send our technicians all over the country to set up the infrastructure anymore. We can do a lot of the work remotely. All the installations and set up for each of the work stations we can do remotely. This really allows us a lot of scalability and the ability to deploy new call centers more rapidly. As you can imagine, that allows us to scale our new business at the same rate or faster into the next few years.

About 1483 days ago Wireless Networks

Tech Talk: Pipe Supplier Networks Depots

CTAP has been supplying the oil and gas industry drilling in the Rocky Mountain region with tubing products and service for 25 years from its Louisville, Colo. headquarters. Andy Carlson, CTAP’s director of IT, tells IncTechnology.com that by centralizing the firm’s information environment and networking its storage yards along railroad routes the firm has improved inventory management, billing, and internal communication. Elizabeth Wasserman: How many storage yards do you manage in your business? Andy Carlson: CTAP supplies steel tubular products, pipe, and services for the drilling rigs in the Rocky Mountain region. We have our service yards strategically positioned on rail sites, where we can receive, ship, store, manage and service our customers’ needs. The tubing products we work with generally range from 20 feet to 40 feet long and are extremely heavy, requiring loaders and heavy machinery to move. We’re currently at six yards now located in Montana, North Dakota, Wyoming, Utah, and Colorado, and expect growth this year. Wasserman: What was the issue with communications between the yards? Carlson: This business has grown by acquiring other businesses and locations over 25 years. As a result, we have very different methods of management, communication and culture in each of these locations. The first task was to be able to standardize our method of inventory management, so we would know how much tubing has come in, how much has gone out, where it’s gone and who it’s for. Historically, this was accomplished on spread sheets and e-mailed into the corporate office on a weekly basis. We used that to assemble our billing packages for customers, but there was latency issue in the timing of the bills and the fact that we had no auditing trial at all. The communication of inventory information was not part of an efficient process and did not leverage available technology. Wasserman: What did you do? Carlson: I started at CTAP a year ago, and the first priority was to create a perpetual inventory management system. We needed a centralized information application and a centralized information environment. Given that I was the only IT person at that time, I needed a cloud based solution, and the expertise to design, build and implement it fast. I chose 3T Systems because they provided both of those services, and had worked well with them in the past. We developed our network environment based on Citrix. It allowed all of us including main office and yards to communicate on the same platform, through e-mail, file sharing, and application sharing. Today, we use the same working environment and we’ve been able to be consistent in the way we work. The second thing we did with 3T was to develop an inventory management application specific to when the product comes in and out of the yards. It’s a perpetual inventory management system so we can bill faster and have accuracy in terms of reporting, both internally and back to our customers. Our customers were asking questions such as, ‘How much of our tubing do you have at the Montana yard?’ It would literally take three days to figure out. Someone would have to go out and count and report back.  The spreadsheet would need to be re-keyed in, then adjusted for any last minute inventory level changes. Today, any one of us can get that information in 10 seconds.  Shortly, customers will be able to get that information on demand through our customer portal. Wasserman: What are the improvements that you’ve noticed? Carlson: It’s revolutionized the way we communicate, forecast and implement decisions. It’s contributed to our profitability in that we are able to assemble billing packages much more quickly.  It’s allowed our management team to monitor the inventory levels from a macro level, and respond to new business accordingly.  It’s allowed our sales team to monitor the inventory levels at the micro level, and respond to customer inquiries in real-time. It’s reduced a lot of errors and inefficiencies. Finally, we now have a competitive advantage over other businesses that provide similar services because of our information system. That’s a big improvement for our customers because sometimes we store some of their inventory, and the confidence they gain in our processes They like to know how much of their inventory is in our yards at any given time, and they now have the tools to get that information a lot quicker than they use to.

About 1513 days ago Business Software

Tech Talk: Chauffeur Staffing Firm Upgrades to ERP

WeDriveU, based in Burlingame, Calif., launched 20 years ago as a firm that finds chauffeurs to drive clients around in the clients’ own cars. More recently, as the company sought to expand into 30 different markets nationwide, founder and CEO Dennis Carlson tells IncTechnology.com that the firm invested in an enterprise resource planning (ERP) system to help manage reservations, billing, and staffing from one central computer system. Elizabeth Wasserman: What type of people do you have as customers? Dennis Carlson: We have top business executives, owners of private businesses, venture capitalists, families — anyone who would prefer to be driven around in their own car. We’re not a limousine service. We drive the customers around in their own cars. Many of our customers take dedicated drivers, either half or full time, although some individuals use our service occasionally for meetings or social occasions. Seniors will use it for mobility reasons. We also do a very large event business. Wasserman: What does a business like yours need with an ERP system? Carlson: Every business needs an ERP system. In the old days, I was using QuickBooks as my ERP and ACT as my CRM system. So basically, I had all the information and nothing was integrated. It got to a point where we were in three large cities — San Francisco, Los Angeles, and New York — and we were going to go to 10 cities. Employees were signing in remotely and double entering everything into ACT and QuickBooks. I worked with the U.S. Small Business Administration’s Technology Advisory Program and looked around for a long time and talked to a lot of people and finally decided to go with Everest. It’s a really robust system built more for a manufacturing company but the great thing is that you can customize it and make it work for your business. Now that one system does it all – from entering customer contact information to schedule rides to billing the customer. Everything is integrated and everything is tied together. I can produce one financial statement by pulling everything together. Wasserman: Do your managers have remote server access? Carlson: All the offices around the U.S. are now signing into the office in Burlingame over the Internet. They work with laptops and wireless cards and BlackBerrys to schedule their rides, do their billing, etc. They enter it all into one system that’s fully integrated. Wasserman: What have the results been? Carlson: We’ve been running this for three years now. The results have been very successful. It’s a very robust system at a fairly good price point. We’re using the backbones of it, main pieces. A lot of features we’re just starting to implement now. We plan to have business activity monitoring (BAM), so if someone sets up an online account, comes into our website, we’ll have a mechanism to thank them for setting up their account. Whatever happens can trigger a result. Customers will be able to sign in and modify their reservations, add information about where they’re going and the system will do it all for us. It will notify the chauffeur of the upcoming ride details. There are ways to use the system to be more productive. We’re now starting to work with multi-lingual features of the system because we want to expand internationally. And from a control standpoint, you train your people on one system and they get used to it so we can replicate it as we go into other cities. The learning curve is shorter. We’ve seen the system getting better and more efficient. We’re very happy with it.

About 1513 days ago Business Accounting Software

Tech Talk: Circuit Maker Automates Accounting Processes

PLX Technology, of Sunnyvale, Calif., designs and makes integrated circuits for customers in the computer server, storage, communications, industrial, and consumer electronics industries. Arthur Whipple, chief financial officer of PLX, tells IncTechnology.com that upgrading to new financial software helps the publically-traded company ensure the proper internal controls that allow him to produce high quality financial statements. Elizabeth Wasserman: Tell us about your business. Arthur Whipple: We’re a high tech Silicon Valley company that builds integrated circuits, which are in an area of connectivity that goes into enterprise class electronics. Our major customers include Cisco, IBM, Huawei, Dell, and various customers that make big servers and big backbone systems. We make devices that stitch together components such as the microprocessor and memory to get them to talk to each other. We’re the glue in these systems. Wasserman: Why did you need new financial software? Whipple: We decided to go with BlackLine Systems. I’ve installed this twice now. First, at my previous company, Silicon Storage Technology. The issue here was initially about account reconciliations. In order to have reliable financial statements, you have to look at each account in the financial system and make sure each agrees with reality. If you have a petty cash box, you need to count it and make sure it’s there. You have to make sure somebody actually counted and made sure the receipts are there. If you have a bank statement, the bank doesn’t know about the checks you’ve written that haven’t been cashed yet. You have to do a reconciliation from outside to the general ledger. You’re looking for an external confirmation for an internal number.  Wasserman: Why is this important? Is it just because you’re a public company? Whipple: What you are trying to do is make sure that the financial statements you put out there are correct. A lot of judgment goes into financial statements. You want to make sure you don’t have mistakes in your financial statements. The reputational risk with poor financial statements can be a real problem. You can lose credibility with your shareholders and that creates huge opportunities for attorneys and other people to come in and make claims when people make mistakes in financial statements. Wasserman: What was behind the timing of the change? Whipple: People have been doing account reconciliations forever. But up until 20 years ago they were done with pencil and paper. They made lists of numbers and added them up and reconciled them to bank statements. Over the last 20 years, people have started to use spreadsheet technology, of which Excel is the most popular. But the programming is done by amateurs. In most financial systems, the code is done by professionals, and locked up, so that you can’t change the code without someone checking it thoroughly. With Excel, an accountant can decide to make a formula change and that can throw off all your numbers. Academics have done tests and found that up to 80 percent of the Excel spreadsheets out there have some error in them. We were able to get rid of all our Excel based reconciliations and move to a program that was hard-coded by people who know what they’re doing and locked down so people can’t make errors.  BlackLine automates the entire process, virtually eliminating manual errors. The other side of this is that we are also tracking tasks. We’re making sure that the things that need to get done actually get done. It’s a glorified to-do list. There are dozens or hundreds of things that have to happen and aren’t reflected as a balance in the financial statement. You have to check with the transfer agent to make sure equity is properly stated. You have to make sure you know the number of checks that are outstanding. The analyses in 10Ks or 10Qs need to be done reliably, and you need to have a history of what you did. In this case, if I write a memo to file regarding a fixed asset impairment, that impairment letter or memo can be stored for people who need access to it and it doesn’t get lost as you have with paper documents. Once we have uploaded the file, it’s protected from loss. Wasserman: What have the results been? Whipple: The results have been excellent. There are a couple of things you don’t know for many years. We haven’t had any issues at all in terms of account reconciliations not being done. I have a dashboard I can look at and I know that all the reconciliations and tasks have been completed and, if not, I know who to go to. When we get to filing SEC documents, everything that needs to be done has been done before I sign my certification that the financial statements have been properly done. CFOs and CEOs are now personally on the hook for the accuracy of those statements under Sarbanes Oxley. I am now confident that all the things required to be done have actually been done in these financial statements.

About 1513 days ago E-Commerce

Tech Talk: Digital Assistant Logs in Remotely

LegalTypist, a virtual assistant practice headquartered on Long Island, N.Y., uses secure technology paired with specialized contractors to help attorneys and law firm administrators upgrade to digital and get the work done.. Andrea Cannavina, the founder, tells IncTechnology.com that by using secure remote access technology, she can easily access files and control her home office computer from anywhere. Elizabeth Wasserman: How does your business use technology? Andrea Cannavina: My actual business has been 100 percent virtual since day one. There was no paper, no face-to-face meetings, no brick and mortar office. Because my clients are attorneys and law firm administrators, the technology I use must meet three requirements—it has to be secure, easily accessible and end user friendly. Wasserman: What did you decide to do? Cannavina: I quickly learned that it was very difficult to keep all my information and devices synced. I was either copying files to disc or e-mailing them to myself in order to work while I was on the road. Since neither of these processes is very secure, I knew I had to find a better way. Thus began my search for what I ultimately found: remote access technology. I went with a service from LogMeIn. Wasserman: How does it work? Cannavina: It’s easy. You log into a Web-based account and that connects your computer to the screen of your office computer. You can view, print and save files, review and send e-mail – basically work as though you are sitting in front of your “normal” computer – even if you’re half way round the world. Wasserman: What have the result been? Cannavina: It’s been much less stress. The remote access technology helps me do administration, billing, customer service and coordinate with my operations manager while I’m traveling on business, at trade shows and the like. As long as my office computer is on and LogMeIn is running, I know I’m good to go.  No coordinating file copies and moving things on to jump drives, etc. It’s also affordable.  There is a free version of the product for home users. For less than $100 per year, LogMeIn Pro gives a business owner secure access and control of their computer.

About 1513 days ago E-Commerce

Tech Talk: Online Game Site Develops Forum

Goozex, an online video game trading business based in College Park, Md., launched in 2006 and now has five employees. CEO Valerio Zanini tells IncTechnology.com that upgrading to a new community server platform enabled the launch of a community forum that helps nurture community trust in the site and its members and has improved customer satisfaction through enhanced services suggested by community members. Elizabeth Wasserman: What is Goozex and how does it work? Valerio Zanini: The premise of the site is to allow customers to trade video games with other people using a point system. You earn points by trading a game with other people and you can then use those points to trade for games with other members. We are able to deliver to our customers true market value for their used games. If you trade them at the local video store, such as GameStop, you’ll lose $20 of value compared to what they’re worth. We only charge them one dollar for a transaction fee. And we make everything easy for them. On the website, they have the option of printing out a shipping label so that they can send the game to their trading partner. Wasserman: Why did you decide to set up a customer forum on your site? Zanini: Goozex is a peer-to-peer trading system and the people that need to trade games with each other need to talk to and trust each other. To sustain and leverage this trust factor we had to integrate a community service into the platform, fostering a community environment where people could virtually meet each other, exchange information, talk about games and problems they may have experienced on the site. They can also use it to ask for suggestions from other members. At the core of the community environment, we realized that there should be a forum and we decided to add this about a year after we launched. Wasserman: What type of technology did you decide to go with behind the forum? Zanini: The Goozex system is based on a Microsoft platform, and we wanted to have a very integrated customer community based on a Microsoft platform as well. There were only a few professionally done products that fit our criteria. We went with Telligent Community Server for several reasons. It was the best on the Microsoft platform. Users can access the forum from within the game pages and talk about specific games. They can also access some features from pictures and avatars and these run on the Community Server forum. Most importantly, the forum is used to create a strong community involvement and feeling among members. We use it to create sense of trust between users that provides the support to drive interaction on our site. Wasserman: What type of results have you seen? Zanini: The most obvious is that our active users and most experienced users now act as the first line customer support for Goozex on the forum. About 50 percent of the customer support requests are addressed on the forum and don’t get to the customer service department at Goozex. That means we have been able to improve our customer support efficiencies by 50 percent. That’s a huge cost savings for us. By officially answering questions and also having our users answer questions helps us create a strong sense of trust between the users, the site and Goozex. Our membership is growing by about 10,000 new members every month. Deploying Community Sever is one of the best decisions we have made in terms of service improvements and strategic choices. The reality is that this community environment or social networking is not our core business. We’re not a social network. We’re an e-commerce application. But fundamentally this has been very important to help us sustain the core of our business.

About 1544 days ago Setting Up a Website

Tech Talk: Gear Maker Allows Customer Reviews

Discgear, a brand of CD and DVD storage cases from CD3, based in Austin, Texas, stared 18 years ago selling in malls and through distributors but has now moved its sales online to Discgear.com. Michael Brown, IT director, tells IncTechnology.com how adding a customer review feature has helped provide customers — and the business — with more information about the products. Elizabeth Wasserman: What is Discgear? What is your business model? Michael Brown: Discgear is the brand name. Our parent company is CD3 Inc. For the past 18 years, we’ve been innovating in designing and manufacturing DVD and CD storage cases. The difference is Discgear offers storage and protection but we also have software that goes along with it that helps you find things and keep your media organized. Our business model has changed over the years. We sell a lot more online than we use to. We started out as a couple of guys selling products in the mall. Then we started to go through a lot of distributors and independent retailers. Our largest partner is QVC and we have seen great success with that format. We also sell online and a lot of our distributors sell our products online. Wasserman: Why is it important to get customers involved in your website? Brown: Being in charge of the website, I wanted to stay on top of what is going on and user-generated content is on everyone’s website these days. For an e-commerce site, the best first step to get user generated content on the website is a product review. It makes sense. They just purchased something from you. Let them talk about it. People appreciate what other people like them have to say. People want to trust a company, but a company can be biased in what it says about its own products. Having a customer tell you the good and sometimes the bad about a product is a very beneficial thing to have. It became obvious that we needed to have something like this added to our site. Being the manufacturer, it also makes sense. A lot of people are starting their searches at the manufacturer’s website these days. Customers may go out and check some places for better deals, but they’re starting the search more and more at the manufacturer’s website. Wasserman: What did you decide to do? Brown: We started going around and seeing what other people were doing. We started looking at our peers and the major e-tailers that have our respect and are doing a good job. More times than not I saw Power Reviews Express on their site. That is what first introduced us to that product. We followed up with them and a couple of other review providers. But it came down to what it cost and how easy it was to start up. Wasserman: How much did it cost and what was involved in setting it up? Brown: It was nothing to set it up. And it costs only $80 a month. The cost is minimal compared to some of the other people providing that service. The setup was a snap. It has an online wizard where you upload a product feed and make some decisions about how you want your reviews to show up. You drop a couple lines of code on your webpage. Within an hour we could have been taking reviews, although we delayed that for about a week and went through and did some testing and made some changes. It’s an online service and what they are doing is managing the reviews database for you. We set up an account drop in code specific to our account on our webpage. When someone writes a review, they look it over and make sure it has no profanity and is relevant to our site and then they send it on to us. We can look at it or we can automatically have it go onto our website. There’s no overhead on our end for keeping track of the reviews. Wasserman: What have the results been? Brown: We rolled out the service on Dec. 1, 2008. We wanted to get it up before the holidays. And within the first three or four weeks we had 100 reviews on our site. We don’t have a deep product line – we have 10 or 15 core products. We saw that as a great success, and it’s given us some good feedback as well. There have been some reviews that have truthfully raised valid points and given us an opportunity to have something brought to our attention that we will probably think about for future design. It’s there for good and for bad. Thankfully, we have heard more good than bad.

About 1544 days ago Wireless Networks

Tech Talk: Cafeteria Chain Streamlines with VPN

K&W Cafeterias, a chain of 33 cafeteria-style restaurants based in Winston-Salem, N.C., has been operating for nearly 71 years with a paper-based system for ordering food and other supplies. Tom Hutchens, senior PC/network support technician, tells IncTechnology.com that secure virtual private network (VPN) technology enabled each cafeteria to place orders directly into the company’s purchasing database. Elizabeth Wasserman: How does a chain of cafeterias use information technology? Tom Hutchens: Within the cafeteria, we do a lot of work with point of sale hardware and software. We have networks both internal at the stores, internal at the home office, and a wide area network encompassing the stores and home office. We have security surveillance systems in the stores and real-time reporting on sales and item counts. Wasserman: What led you to install VPN technology? Hutchens: The reason we turned to VPN was we wanted our stores to be able to place orders to our suppliers pretty much directly into our database without having to call up like in the old days. Each store used to have to call up to the purchasing department or do a paper order and fax that in. The purchasing department would then have to key those in to our IBM AS400 database server, which holds all of our accounting databases. We wanted to get rid of having to use paper and we wanted to streamline our ordering system. The only way we could do that is to let stores input orders into the system directly. In about half of our stores, we also have a closed circuit TV system, CCTV. It’s a digital-based DVR system that basically means you have a bunch of cameras and they record onto a hard drive and then you’re able to save a great quantity of data. It’s larger than video tapes or CDs. It has a Web interface on the back end and you can go into each one in each store and see what’s going on in the store. We can do this from home or the office. We log in to our VPN and go to each store to track incidents and accidents. Wasserman: What did you decide to do? Hutchens: The way we figured it would work best was to use VPN so that our stores could connect to the K&W network. For the cost, that was the best technology and, we’re finding today that it’s still the best way to continue to do our ordering. We turned to a local company, Secure Design, which does all of our managed services work, for the VPN service. Wasserman: What have the results been? Hutchens: It’s been great for us. The orders now come in over the computer. The time involved as far as ordering everything has been greatly reduced. We don’t have to worry about having someone keying in anything anymore. We’s been able to cut down on paper and on work hours at the store levels. Our purchasing department is only a two-person department. Most of their time now, where an order is concerned, is spent fixing mistakes — you know when someone with a fat finger puts in a wrong number. It’s definitely cut down on the time it takes to get these orders done. It’s cut down on mistakes and misreads. And it’s cut down on a lot of theft and insurance claims. Through the security systems, we can catch accidents that happen or catch people stealing from us. It’s paid for itself.