BUTCHER; Big Bill the Butcher

Big Bill the Butcher had been in business for twenty-three years at the one location. Bill had built up the business from scratch, attracting and holding his large customer base with quality product and ‘do-everything’ customer service.

Bill ran a large operation with 45 staff and a turnover of $4million annually. He was doing well. However, after finalising his accounts one year, Bill’s accountant informed him that he estimated Bill was losing $37 000 per annum. Bill knew he had a problem.

TouchTec Marketing Ltd (TouchTec) where asked by Bill’s accountant to produce a solution for a Butcher.

The initial meeting identified the butcher’s main problem as loss of product. This occurred by either going out the back door (theft) or over the counter (incorrect product being sold). It became obvious that the client had no real idea of what stock they had at any stage of the processing.

When TouchTec did a site visit we realised three things that needed to be achieved before ProTouch would take control of the Meat Shop:

1) Take control of the stock coming into the Shop. As they boned the carcase, they needed to produce a manufacture mechanism that took, for example, a side of Beef and applied a Yielding table to the carcase to produce a number of cuts or end item products like mince.

2) Needed to have a scale which interfaced to ProTouch, (which we had to develop, we used the Wedderburn DS640; now, that model has been superseded by the DS880).

3) Tracking customers’ choices. The butcher’s customers had three different areas to choose the meat from: the Pork, Chicken and Beef refrigerators. The customer could browse and choose different cuts of meat from any combination of the three areas. The serving personnel would follow the customer and handle and wrap the meat according to the customer’s choice.

For speed, the butcher needed to have a ProTouch register and a scale at each area; so three stations were created: Pork, Chicken and Beef. To make the sale follow the server from one area to another, TouchTec Marketing modified the ProTouch system to allow the sale to move between registers, following the server. The person serving would start a sale on one station (logging price and quantities of each cut) and move on to another station and, after logging on to the new station, the sale is then pulled from the first, or previous, station and is presented to the one they are currently working at. The process is repeated at the next station if necessary.

ProTouch already had the ability to have multiple sales personnel, with their own orders open at the same time; this allowed multiple servers to work the same area or station at the same time.

We introduced a further ProTouch POS register which performed the role of the cashier station. Once the customer’s order was complete the person serving logged on to the cashier machine. Like the meat stations, this pulled the customer’s order up, ready to be paid for or charged. The customer still left the shop with a single receipt, listing all their purchases by cut, quantity and price; the butcher could track the sale of product by beast, cut and quantity.

The shop front worked well, tracking each server’s sales and all the products being sold. The staff happily adopted the technology because they never had more than a knife, a pencil and a simple cash register to handle. ProTouch coped easily with all the meat lines, simply creating one button for each product.

After the initial system was implemented TouchTec fine-tuned the manufacturing side to allow the cost to flow through to the stock that was associated with the yield of a carcase. This allowed for the real cost to be applied to stock or meat lines. Consequently, this allowed the costs to be truly rectified back into the daily sales report. Running ProTouch’s manufacture module became a simple step through the day: when a new carcase was removed from the cool room the butcher would run the weight through the manufacture module. The introduction of the ProTouch manufacturing module to the system immediately allowed the butcher to track carcasses within the shop, at any point of the day.

For further protection TouchTec housed the all-in-one touch screens in a purpose built stainless steel case.

One surprise that came out of the woodwork: a ProTouch POS Station with scale was cheaper than the top-of-the-line barcode scale.

Within two years of deploying the system the client opened another shop and installed the same ProTouch set-up to control the new shop. .