Just-in-time is in fashion - Company Operations

Communications News, Feb, 2001

Profit from real-world, real-time inventory management.

In the tough retail fashion industry, Houser Shoes has flourished by providing quality shoes to its customers during many years of expansion. Each of its 16 retail stores--located throughout Tennessee, West Virginia and the Carolinas--faces the challenge of managing inventory relative to seasonal changes, style trends, and the purchasing patterns and demographics of specific store locations.

The typical purchasing cycle for retail businesses, such as the shoe industry, involves buying inventory six months before 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 faced this very situation.

Through the combined efforts of several companies and their products and 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.

Houser Shoes' headquarters in Asheville, NC, has instituted the services of an IBM AS/400 midrange computer for more than 10 years. The headquarters uses the AS/400 to perform large internal processing jobs, as well as jobs for its remote store locations. One of these involves the inventory management for the more than 25 point-of-sale (POS) registers that are located at the 16 stores.

FINDING THE RIGHT FIT

Before the new solution was implemented, Houser Shoes was having problems with unreliable communications between the store locations and the corporate headquarters' AS/400. Store personnel manually dialed into the headquarters' AS/400 using the old software, often requiring a good deal of time to accomplish the connection to the AS/400. In addition, inventory information was not being delivered to each store in a timely manner, resulting in lost revenue and unsold inventory.

Houser Shoes contacted Jim Denton, president of J.C. Denton Associates Inc., who selected Atlanta-based CQ Computer Communications' CQ-3780 terminal emulation software and external Hayes OPTIMA modems with the AutoSync 2 feature provided by Boston-based Zoom Telephonics Inc.

According to Gary Houser, president of the company. "With our old system, we had many problems with communications in polling the stores," he offers. "Every day, we had to manually poll the stores. It was a nightmare. Since our present system was installed, 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 solution for Houser Shoes was designed to operate in unattended mode through CQ's specially designed scripting language. Every morning at 12:05, the AS/400 automatically calls each POS terminal in each store and information is transferred. The modem technology provides both synchronous and asynchronous connectivity, using the async serial COM port on any PC or notebook computer.

The sync/async conversion is required for host communications of the inventory information to Houser Shoes' AS/400 host. Through the AutoSync 2 feature in these modems, there is no additional hardware required at each remote store's PC. The solution does not require an additional internal adapter card, representing a savings of 20% to 40% when compared to typical adapter card-based solutions. Installation is also more convenient, in that the PC never has to be opened or reconfigured for an internal adapter card. As an added benefit, the modems can also be used for asynchronous applications, such as credit card processing.

TRANSMITTING IN STRIDE

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, price changes, sales reports and updated inventory information--are transmitted from the Asheville office staff to personnel in the stores, and vice versa, and are stored in the computer during the day.

Since the solution was first implemented in the Houser Shoes store in Asheville, all the other POS registers have been equipped with the solution. Not only is inventory information transmitted more reliably among all the stores, but other benefits have also occurred. Credit card verification, which had taken up to three minutes, now takes as little as 40 seconds.

The solution enables Houser Shoes to implement accurate and reliable real-time inventory management--all while doing business in style.

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