Eating Your Own Dogfood (aka Using Your Own Products)
You can only learn so much by watching and talking to customers, doing usability testing and reading feedback. I’ve found it to be really valuable to have the team use the product and truly walk in our customers’ shoes.
As context, I am head of the Board of a local non-profit, the Bay Area Glass Institute (www.bagi.org). To help fulfill our glass-art educational mission, we hold several large scale public events every year where artists sell their glass art. BAGI uses QB POS to make sales, track inventory and customers at these events. Our fall event, the Great Glass Pumpkin Patch®, is held in conjunction with the Palo Alto Art Center and has gross proceeds of over $300,000 in just two days with about 4,000 items sold to thousands of customers.
The last weekend in April was our spring event, the Great Glass Farmers Market. This was smaller than the Pumpkin Patch, and the first time we held in our parking lot with about a dozen participating artists. The goal was to raise money for the artists, BAGI, and the Second Harvest Food Bank as well as bring visitors into BAGI's studio to watch glass art being made to educate them about the process.
Inventory Set-up and Label Creation
Since all of the items are handmade, we need to provide labels for each artist’s work to make the sales process efficient and track inventory to accurately count sales for each artist. The artists provided a list of the items via email they thought they would make including price and basic description. BAGI’s operations manager consolidated that information into a spreadsheet. I used the import process in QB POS to add new vendors and bring in the inventory for each artist in one step. That process worked really well as it took only a few minutes and alerted me to some errors I had made before importing the information into inventory and turning my inventory into a mess. I fixed the problems and imported smoothly.
I used the Zebra LP2824 printer to print tags and had a problem getting my PC to recognize it. After multiple attempts on my own, I called support on Saturday morning. They picked up quickly and in about 2 minutes diagnosed I had plugged the USB cable to the second port, not the first one that the PC expected. We had seen similar issues with customers and we’re going to do something about that in the QB POS software itself as well as work with the manufacturers to make the installation easier of hardware. The printer works so fast … I printed over 3,000 tags for over 100 items in one morning.
We printed out labels on the small size labels and customized the design of that label to put the artists name and description along with the price on the tag. We also set up two non-inventory items (donation to BAGI and donation to the Second Harvest Food bank, a partner in the event) so we could take donations right at check-out. We left the price blank on the two donation items so the cashier would need to fill them in at check-out.
Installing the Software and Hardware
We wanted to set-up a five workstation check-out tent connected via a wireless network to the BAGI network to process credit cards. I worked with the team last year to set up QB POS on a network and v5 was dramatically easier … I installed QB POS on the first PC as the Server and when I installed POS on the other PC’s, the Database Connection Wizard found the Server and connected to the database automatically. This was a real wow for me given the difficulty I had last year with trying to figure out how to set it up (including calls to support that I did not need this time). Hardware set-up was also easier as we used the set-up interview to guide us through the hardware install process.
The wireless network was another story all together … although unrelated to QB POS, it was essential that we have connectivity so we could take credit card sales since nearly all of our customers buy with credit card. None of us were networking experts and it took several hours of time on the phone with the wireless device manufacturer and SBC (who provides the DSL service at BAGI) to figure out how to do what we wanted.
To be continued … I’ll talk about training the volunteer cashiers, the check-out process for patrons, running reports through-out the day to give the artists real-time feedback on how they and the event was doing, reconciling payments at the end of the day, and producing the final reports.
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