Background

The investigation and decision of replacing the old OSAS software solution actually began years ago. In 2005, after spending 36 years of working in the technology industry, I found myself working for a small family owned retail store that sold HVAC, electrical and plumbing parts. They sold both locally and on the Internet. Their Internet business has grown to be a small percentage of the total store's business. That first year of working in the Store, I focused on learning about the various items to sell, the internal computer systems and building our own house. By late 2006, we had finished the building of our house and I started spending time at the Store learning about how the Internet business ran and the systems to support it. Within one year, the employee who handled the Internet business left and I was asked to take his place.

This began an activity of growing the Internet business and improving the internal systems and processes to support it. My first technical involvement was to replace the character based Unix terminals with PCs, then I started managing the Internet advertising budget by managing the yellowpages.com, Yahoo and Google advertising accounts. I also frequently advised and coached the owner as to technical aspects, including interfacing with the webmaster to who was getting the web site to use a shopping cart and online credit card processing. In 2007, the owner asked if we should look for a new computer system to replace the old one which was over 10 years old. At that time, we couldn't find anything that was within the budget so we updated the hardware and software, but basically kept the same system.

By 2008, the Internet sales had doubled from 2006 and it was on a growth rate of 25 - 30% growth per month. The increase Internet sales put a stress on the staff and internal processes to the extend the staff could not handle the load and since much of the sales resulted from phone calls, the results was that we limited our own growth. That prompted us to look for ways to improve our systems. We implemented new ways of handing Internet work. We split the Sales traffic from the pre-sales traffic. We implemented a collaborative solution using Google Docs so more than one of the staff could access sales and pre-sales data simultaneously. We added staff and that took us over the winter peak season with some head room.

However, with growth still on healthy increase, in 2009 we, again, started looking for new systems to help improve our internal processes. In the summer of 2009, we started serious investigation into a few new software solutions. It was then that we started looking at Assist2k from RLA.

Around June, 2009, a change to the way Google indexing was performed was rolled out by Google and we saw an immediately drop in sales. That, combined with the the bad economic environment, we decided to postpone purchasing new software. By the beginning of the store's peak season, in September of 2009, we recovered from the Google change and Internet sales was back on a very healthy growth.

As soon as we could, we started looking at a new software system. See next post for that activity.