"The reward for work well done is the opportunity to do more”.

We believe in continuous improvement... Making things better. 

We just wrapped up four months of IT development and deployed PTOS2, a rewrite of PTOS: The Price Ticket Ordering System, for The Beer Store. Out with the old and in with the new.

Back in the early 2000’s, we worked with The Beer Store and redesigned all of the interior signs and pricing displays for their 440+ stores. The Beer Store has over 300 brands, in up to 10 different pack sizes in either cans or bottles - all over 7 different display types. The problem with pricing displays, especially for a product like beer, is that prices changed often which involved manual entry and management using email, Excel spreadsheets, a lot of copy and pasting - time consuming and very detailed. 

PTOS

In 2005, PTOS was designed to streamline the process of making and tracking changes to in-store price tickets. What used to take a lot of time was reduced to minutes. The order was automatically submitted and using traditional graphic files, processed itself through to store wide delivery in three days. Great you say, not quite... We felt the client was still spending too much time on the system and we knew we could improve accuracy.

PTOS2

We just launched PTOS2 - a faster, more easily customized and streamlined version in Ruby on Rails. The biggest benefit of the redo is now PTOS2 puts all of the price changes directly into system generated PDF forms, locks them and merges them into single-download files. This removed a major source of human error and greatly reducing proofing time. 

Now the user experience is much simpler. Changes can be made on the fly; easily. PTOS2 saves time and will shortly move from a 2-step process to a 1-step process. 

PTOS2 has already proven its worth. We have many future plans for new features like importing csv files and updates to make it even more useful and streamline the business process even further. Stay tuned...