A not-for-profit environmental education center developed an application using Microsoft Access for managing membership. The database had some problems with referential integrity and needed some design changes. The queries for renewals, forms for data entry, and reports also needed some improvements.

We looked at their processes and procedures and made enhancements to the system to support their operations. We also cleaned up the data and put controls in place to improve the ease-of-use.

We learned that Microsoft Access can be very useful in small office settings but the support of skilled IT Professionals can increase an organization’s return on their technology investement. It also makes more sense to spend some time designing a database correctly from the beginning than to repair it due to a faulty design after it contains vital data.

A fair trade retail store contacted us on several occasions regarding their POS Computer ‘locking up’. This would only happen during customer transactions. The customers impacted would have to wait for the volunteer to fumble with the computer and/or seek assistance from one of the volunteer managers. The staff did not know how to resolve the issue so they would physically power down the computer without gracefully shutting down the operating system first.

We made several trips to the store to review the system and application event logs. As volunteers for the store, we also waited to experience the behavior for ourselves. But, we never witnessed it nor found any errors to indicate a problem.

We created a guide, complete with screen shots, to instruct the volunteers on options to cancel processes that were not responding and to restart the computer using various methods in case the mouse or keyboard ceased functionings. While developing the guide, we finally reproduced the issue and demonstrated the behavior to one of the managers who had repeatedly reported the problem. As it turned out, volunteers would occassionally bump the mouse and cause it to lose focus on the POS application. This would prevent the bar code scanner from working and give the appearance that the computer was ‘locked up’ (although the software, operating system, and hardware were all fully-functional). The first step in our troubleshooting guide was simply to move the mouse and click on the POS application in order to resume the sales transaction. No issues have been reported since the guide was delivered.

A Fair Trade retail store had been using manual inventory control due to the lack of technology. Other similar businesses had recommended a Back Office/POS System. As part of the initial implementation, the volunteers from the store would need to manually enter the bar code, product description, category, cost, vendor, prices, and quantity of every item in inventory. Many of the volunteers had little experience with computers.

We partnered with the major vendors to get files containing this data, converted the files, and imported the data into the Pervavise SQL database used by the application. This saved the volunteers many hours and also ensured accuracy of the data for the initial roll out of the system.

We learned that Fair Trade vendors are usually willing to assist with improving the efficiency of retail operations.