1. WIRELESS TECHNOLOGY FOR EFFICIENT STOCK TAKING AND INVENTORY
Prepared by:
Riad A. S. Abeid; IT Manager
Blue Salon Group
Doha-Qatar

2. Agenda Introduction Current infrastructure The problem
The wireless solution
Compression
Benefits
Conclusion

3. Executive Summary
The IT department aligned its strategy with the business strategy, through the implementation of IT to drive the overall strategy.
Information Technology is an enabling tool for our business to grow, its not our business
IT contributes positively to the bottom line
IT made business easier
IT increased human resources capabilities

4. The Blue Salon Group
Blue Salon started its operations in Qatar in 1981 as a retail department store and a distribution agency for several prestigious consumer products.
Blue Salon now is a group, consisting of more than ten companies with different activities including distribution and retail, All these ten companies together have more than 38 outlets in Qatar excluding the main showroom which is about 5000 square meters, the biggest department store in Qatar employing more than 800 people and with a turnover of about US $70,000,000.00

5. Blue Salon WAN Infrastructure
With over 38 remote locations and the main office, Blue Salon flaunts to be one of the biggest retailers and online inventory leaders in Qatar
Salon plays a vital role in the support of the overall business of Retail and wholesale.
The IT department has a strong software and Hardware & Networking divisions.
Blue Salon has the following assets to its credit
Domain Controllers
Backup domain controllers
Exchange Server
ISA server
Oracle (AIX) Database server
Terminal Service enabled servers
File/Print Server
Fax server
Antivirus Server

6. Blue Salon connects to the remote location
by two methods: (method 1)
1- Locations with less than or up to 5 users connect through the Bundled Analog lines provided by the local Telecom and Internet Service provider Q-Tel.
This connection is done using a router (Cisco 3700 series) at the main office which is a 40 channel BRI ISDN connection.
The remote locations are connected through a Cisco 1700 series router with the Bundled Analog WIC2AM which connects two normal analog lines of 56kbps each, hence gaining a total bandwidth of approx 100kbps application usage, equivalent to the ISDN speed.

8. Blue Salon connects to the remote location by two methods: (method 2)
2- Locations with more than 6 users, usually in big malls with more than 6 or 7 outlets containing more 12 users connect through the MPLS (Multi Protocol Layered Switching), which is an IP/VPN connection managed and provided by Q-Tel.
The MPLS structure is a bottle neck connection with detailed drawing given below
The main connection is a 1Mbps line sharing its usage to the other 3 lines having a speed of 256kbps each

9. Blue Salon IP VPN Hyatt Plaza Royal Plaza The Mall City Centre Q-Tel
256kbps
1Mbps
Blue Salon
IP VPN
IP/MPLS Network
Q-Tel

10. The Problem
Blue Salon with more than 38 retail outlets and around five of them being department stores have nearly 400,000 different items
Manual stock taking for Blue Salon or any of the outlets took more than three months to complete. This period included the physical stock taking, data entry and data processing to get to the final variance result
Since Blue Salon strictly follows the policy of non-stop daily operations at any cost, physical stock was taken after normal working hours, with about 40 teams of two Persons each in cases of the big stores
For the smaller outlets, it used to take us more than 10 hours per store just for the physical counting
This cost us our time, money and human resources
There was a solution for this with the handheld barcode scanners. But this solution needed data uploading and downloading each and every time we needed to take stock and then generate the stock variance report

11. The Final Wireless solution
Since we had computers as the point of sales machines in every outlet, i.e. from single counters to multiple counters in the department stores and the warehouses, we decided to utilize these for the stock taking purposes, whether it be the yearly or the perpetual stock taking
We developed a program for taking stocks, as a part of our ERP that was able to read the item barcodes using wireless scanners (Bluetooth or RF technologies) connected to the PCs in each outlet
These scanners could read and access each and every item barcode on the display shelves, and move it online to the ERP system directly at the same time.
The results were very clear. We had saved on time, money and human resources

12. Comparison between the Manual & Wireless Technology Stock taking.
COST
Manual
Wireless
Money in US $
4000
1200
Time
640 working hours
192 working hours
Human Resources
40 Teams
12 Teams
Result time
10 days
On the spot

13. Benefits of Wireless solution
Another big advantage we had with the wireless stock taking was during the perpetual stock taking time.
The stock controller could get the final variance report in the same store as soon as the physical count was over, rather than to take the counts back to the back office for data upload, processing and result generation.

14. Provided better support for the business
Conclusion
From our experience using this method for inventory control made the stock controller’s and outlives easier and saved a lot of:
TIME
Lowered COST
& Increased ACCURACY.
Provided better support for the business