StateWays is the only magazine exclusively covering the control state system within the beverage alcohol industry, with annual updates from liquor control commissions and alcohol control boards and yearly fiscal reporting from control jurisdictions
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ver's licenses with the same scanner they use on prod- uct. "The system will imme- diately tell you if the person is 21 and it will also tell you if the driver's license is expired," said Fox. "It just takes one quick scan, so it helps get people in and out of the store quickly." That's not the only thing that's quicker. "The touch screens make check-out much faster, the receipt printers are twice as fast, and because the interfaces are so clean and easy-to-use, training is very quick," Fox said. What advice does Fox have for achieving a smooth roll-out to stores? "We had a good, solid plan," he said. The DABC ran a lab at headquarters "that completely mirrored a store, from soup to nuts," he said, "and we used that to work out all the bugs." Still, when the DABC began rolling out the system for real to the stores, it had a "war room" where stores could call immediately when they had any problems at all, to alert the DABC's IT services team. And when updating a store, the IT services team would arrive between 4 and 5 a.m. and have the entire system up and running by 9, an hour before the store was due to open. "There was no down time for any of the stores," said Fox. Feel Good Technology L ast April, tornados and severe storms ripped through the state of Virginia, killing ten, injuring 100, destroying 212 homes and damaging more than a thousand others. The people at the state's Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control (DABC) wanted to do something to help their fellow Virginians. The DABC's information-technology staff part- nered with the people of the DABC's wholesale/retail division to come up with a way for the point-of-sale system in Virginia's 333 state stores to accept donations to the Virginia Disaster Relief Fund established by Governor Bob McDonnell. State-store customers can donate money to the fund right at the point-of-sale, using cash, credit or debit. The POS system even automatically prints out receipts that customers can use to document their donations when filing their taxes. "The last numbers I saw, two months ago, were that people had donated over $110,000 through the stores to the fund," said Fox. While the capability, which was developed entirely StateWays s www.stateways.com s September/October 2011 IPhone set up to be a mobile register for Radiant's CounterPoint POS system, equipped with a jacket that allows credit-card swiping. in-house by the depart- ment, is currently being used just for tornado relief, it can be used in the future to raise money for victims of other disasters. It could even – "God forbid," said Fox – collect donations simultaneously for multiple funds if different dis- asters struck at the same time. "It is a really cool project," said Fox, "and from a business stand-point, it's been a real brand enhancer for the agency." Improving the Customer Experience T he Idaho State Liquor Division (LD) also has a homegrown POS system in its 66 state stores. "We bought a pretty basic system many, many years ago – and we bought the source code with it," explained Keven Lowe, the LD's deputy director in charge of information technology and security. The LD is not at the point where it has to replace the system entirely. It has been working on updating the software and it is in the process of replacing store hardware to add 22-inch touch screens and 9-inch customer displays. In a nice bit of sleight of hand, the LD plans to turn the old POS computers into customer kiosks. Customers will be able to scan products to see informa- tion and print out what they find on a small printer. Gathering the information and content for the kiosks "is becoming a big project," admitted Lowe. "We're asking suppliers to provide a small picture, a description and drink suggestions for their products," he said, "but we are also interested in providing our cus- tomers with local information. We're asking local bar- tenders what's popular in their areas too." The LD hopes to have the kiosks in stores sometime next year. Meanwhile, the IT team continues to look for and work on ways to improve their systems. One of the lat- est improvements was the addition of a website interface for licensees to input their orders, instead of calling or faxing them in. "The system will automatically suggest the store nearest to them or they can choose any one of the other stores," explained Lowe, "and the system is kept updated, in close to real time, on what the inventory quantities are in each store. If the licensee's store does not have enough quantity for the order, the system will alert the licensee and they can decide whether they want to wait for it to come into that store or choose another store to process their order." How does the LD, which has two computer pro- grammers on its IT staff, decide what to update? "We are constantly asking store managers what we can do 41