I arrived at VANA to take a training session yesterday morning to hear it announced at the door, it is canceled. It was a shock both to me and people waiting to do this session. I looked who was there and from what I knew we had enough! Murphy's law again originally we assumed that VANA would be handling the attendance as usual. This time, VANA told us that we should do it. So I did it with Paul. The day before I was sick, so not contactable when Michael was doing last-minute organizing for the meeting. He did not know of my list of people only there were two on Paul's list and thinking only two booked, Michael was shocked. We normally get ten, twenty is not uncommon so he decided to cancel it. So he rang up both clients to cancel. However the ones on my list, showed up. Since I was there and they were too, we carried on with the training.
These were experienced newsagents who knew the industry having been in it for years. They knew the program and they wanted to learn a little more. With me, however, it is full on
Unfortunately because all I had was one day, I had to skip much. In the morning, we did customers. What I stressed here is the need to do an audit on your customers. It is now so easy for someone to make a minor mistake in the computer so a newspaper is delivered free by the newsagency long after the subscription is over. We often find errors doing changeovers from other systems to ours. Roughly we expect to find in 200 accounts, one error. Since a typical error is about $10 a week or about $500 a year it is worth auditing the accounts. This can be done over time. Say the accounts starting with A tomorrow. Next week the B's then soon.
We then went to subagents and then stock. Here I spoke about the need to check slow and zero selling items. I showed them the reports on how to get that information out. Then suggested some work practices here that work. At this point, I did not have time to get into the “sigma six” ideas, which also includes the sales of fast-moving items.
We then moved into the cash register. Since everyone knew the basic functions here, I showed them the cash register department analysis. I covered many such reports. Then showed them how to handle the sales per linear feet and how to monitor it over time.
Then later we discussed some of the electronic data interchanges that is occurring now, they were surprised how much we had achieved here and finally, we discussed some of the new technologies now coming at which point we had to end as the day had ended
I am waiting to hear their feedback comments. Based on the comments when they left, I suspect they will be positive.
