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Positive Planning Prevents Poor Performance

Updated

True Story #1

A POS installation with initial training will take about 4 hours, depending on complexity.

POS installation organised for 1pm.

Get to site :

  • No data points run from POS location to kitchen for PRODUCTION PRINTERS.
  • Not enough power points provided for requested hardware.
  • No where to place / mount hardware

 

Not ideal, but with time we could work around these “hurdles”. The project manager will get slapped around a bit later.

At 3pm staff arrived for initial training. What the ? Another issue to be raised with the project manager.

At 5pm customers started arriving for a “soft opening”.

I got out of there at 11pm.

True Story #2

Tuesday afternoon.

*ring* *ring*

“I can definitely help you with a POS system for your business. When are you opening ?”

“Thursday ? Next week ? That’s a bit tight, but if you have all of your ITEMS in electronic format, I can do a data import.”

“What do you mean this week ?”

True Story #3

Salesman orders a label printing scale for installation in a new grocery outlet.

Scale is certified for trade use and lodged with courier with plenty of time to get to site.

While waiting, the business owner provides his scalable product listing and the support team load the items into the POS system and into a DB that can be pushed to the label printing scale when it arrives.

Excellent work.

Techs go to site for the installation.

Everything they need is there.

Except for the thermal labels the scale needs.

These are a high quality label that can only be sourced from the importer on the other side of Australia.

The project manager and the salesman are going to get slapped around tonight.

The 5 Ps of Life

This is sometimes called the 7 Ps of life and is a British army adage.

Proper Planning and Preparation Prevents Piss Poor Performance

Planning is something you will see often in these KB Articles.

The 3 examples have the same thing in common.

  • None of them were spur of the moment decisions.
  • Thought was given to generating a Business Plan and organising financing.
  • #1 #2 spent months fitting out the restaurant, deciding on paint colours, table cloths, which dishes to offer, negotiating with suppliers, etc
  • #3 the salesman left his brain at home. It is obvious if you have a label printer that you are going to need labels for it.

 

If you …

  • at least have a rough idea of the process,
  • think about how the end result looks to your cashiers & production staff,
  • can envision how it appears to the customer,
  • know what sort of information you need to get out of your POS,
  • have an idea of what you want to be doing in 3, 6 and 12months from now,

 

… you are off to a good start.

If you know where you want to end up, you will also reduce the amount of work you need to do to meet your future goals.

Stick an Abacus to a Biscuit Tin

YumaPOS is not a basic cash register.

Sure, you could make YumaPOS behave like one, but what is the point in spending the time, energy and dollars if that is your goal ?

The YumaPOS ecosystem is a set of tools, that with a bit of thought and planning, can be used to provide invaluable insights about your business and help it to grow.

External Resources

There are many fantastic articles on business planning, written by people far more intelligent than I am.

The site I like, with no affiliation, is the Small Business Development Corporation.

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