Challenge Accepted: Spend $0 and Build a World Class Retail Computer System.

I had heard a long time client was let go recently, so I wasn’t surprised when he called asking for a favor. After a few minutes of catching up, he told me he was finally crossing the chasm and starting his own shop. As a founding executive of a company that grew from scratch to over 250 stores myself, some of my favorite work is helping other retailers launch new concepts.

His favor, however, surprised me.

“I need to cash in the favor bank and have you recommend a world class computer system to run my entire operation on a limited budget. In fact, the budget is $0. Just a PC I have in my office.”

How quickly I accepted the challenge surprised me almost as much as how great of a computer system we were able to build.

Challenge Accepted: Part 1 – The sum of the parts

We’ll break down creating an ENTIRE retail operations system with no start-up costs by biting off digestible pieces ranked by the most important parts. Lets take inventory of what we have to start with:

1.)  A decent, basic windows computer. (In this case Windows XP Pro)

2.)  A keyboard, mouse and monitor.

3.)  A fast enough (cable in this case) Internet connection.

That’s it!

Now, lets break down the building blocks we will find for our system.

·      Operating System

·      Point of Sale

·      Purchase Order and Open to Buy

·      Inventory and Planning Management

·      Merchandise Management

·      Accounting

·      Payroll and Employee Management

·      Ecommerce

·      Report Building

·      Executive Dashboard

Challenge Accepted: Part 2 – Point of Sale

Bottom line – never, ever, spend a dime on old, downloaded point of sale software again. Never. Ever.

More tomorrow….