Microsoft's Retail Management System

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Is Customization Right for your Small Business?

Many of our customers can see that like all computerized cash register systems, Microsoft's Retail Management Systems is not always the perfect fit. That's where we come in. RITE is one of a very few premier customization developers for RMS and have created many customizations that have made their owners a return on investment many times over. Many businesses are unsure about if and why they need customizations so when considering it, you should put it in terms of return on investment.

How? Consider an example. Lets say you see a bottle neck during check out when situation X occurs, customers are getting irritated by the wait and think to yourself, there has to be a better way! Guess what, there probably is.

So you come to RITE and tell us about your situation and we reply with a solution that turns a customers wait during situation X from 4 minutes to 1.5 minutes. You say great, but how much and then you have to figure out if its worth it. Here's how:

First, figure out where value is being added. Here, employee labor is being reduced, customer satisfaction is being increased, and you could even go on to quantify increased employee moral because of less upset customers, etc. Even though things like employee moral, and reduction in errors and liability are important and real factors to consider, for simplicities sake we'll stick to the first two.

Second, assign a value to the components and gather your relevant information. Here we'll say employee labor is $10 per hour (even though your paying them 8 after you consider your share of their taxes and accounting costs of having an extra employee its probably much more) and customer satisfaction is worth $1 for every minute less seconds they wait in line (probably much more than that! I hate waiting in line). Then we'll also say you had 500 customers last year that encountered situation X. You also note that there is more than one customer in line in 1 out of every 5 situation X's so additional customers have to suffer. Lets say the second customer has to wait half as long as the first and the third has to wait half as long as a second. An important note is to be somewhat conservative with your numbers, we want to make sure that even in the worst case scenario, this is still going to make you money!

Third, do the math.

Before Customization	After Customization
500 X 4 = 2000 minutes for both customer and clerk	500 X 1.5 = 750
500 X (1/5) X (4 X (1/2)) = 200 minutes for second in line customers	This almost be completely eliminated because by the time the second customer lined up, they would already be done!
500 X (1/5) X (4 X (1/4)) = 100 minutes for third customer	Same as above
Total customer waiting = 2300 minutes per year Total Employee Labor = 2000 minutes per year	Total customer waiting = 750 minutes per year Total employee labor = 750 minutes per year
Total Costs = 2300 X 1 + 2000/60 X 10 = $2,633.33	Total Costs = 750 X 1 + 750/60 X 10 = $875

Total Cost of Customization	$1,000
Total Savings = 2,633.33 - 875.00	$1,758.33
Return On Investment (ROI) - you've almost doubled your money in the first year.

This type of situation does not always happen but most of our customers realize this type of return on their customization investment. That what makes us different, RITE's number 1 goal is creating a return on our customers technology investment!