My Story About the Web

My Story About The Web

I was working for a retailer in 1999 as the Chief Financial Officer? This company had 9 retail locations in three different states and had aspirations to become a twenty-five store chain? While each of the locations and the corporate office had lots of computers, non of the computers could talk to the computers at another location? I had asked for quotes many times over the years for what it would cost to network each location, but the response was always many thousands of dollars per month?

Clearly, a WAN (Wide Area Network) was out of our price range? This resulted in a purchasing system built around the fax machine? However, problems abounded around this system:

Store managers would fax the purchasing department with orders that were many times unreadable.
Store managers would swear up and down that they had placed an order, but the purchasing department was equally adamant that nothing had been received?
Store managers would regularly submit a duplicate order if a truck didn't pull up to their warehouse in what they considered a timely manager.
The purchasing and accounting departments never knew if the order to the vendors had been received by the store.

The whole system was inefficient resulting in higher than necessary inventory levels, products paid for that never were received, and constant bickering between the corporate division and store managers? There was plenty of blame to go around for everybody as to why things were not working right, but management had no way to figure out who to attach it to.

At this time we were using the Internet for email purposes and the Company President asked me one day 'Why can't we use the Internet instead of faxing?' Well, slowly the lights came on and I started talking to our Web Hosting company for some help in designing a system to replace the fax machine? Over the next 18 months we developed a web-based program that allowed everybody in the company to see the status of their orders.

Now a funny thing happened as a byproduct of this approach to ordering. Yes, we eliminated most of the complaints about ordering, which was our primary goal? We also reduced our costs of placing an order significantly, which was not a goal at all? Our reduced costs allowed us to recover our software production costs in less than six months? How did this happen?

Long-distance fax costs were eliminated.
Long-distance telephone calls went down because there was an easy way to look up the status of the order and see when you could expect it? The problems with readability were eliminated.
The Purchasing Department's time to produce a Purchase Order were chopped almost to nothing since many store orders could be changed into a P.O. with the click of a button.
The Accounting Department's time in trying to determine if the goods were received was greatly reduced. Now the stores could report the status of received shipments with a few clicks.
Inventory shrinkage was reduced? You could still have a double order, but you really had to work at it to make it happen.

The bottom-line is that the Internet is the poor man's WAN that allows multi-location businesses to get some real benefits from all the computers they have purchased.

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