FRDCSA

SHOPS

Brief: Integrated POS system
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  • SHOPS: Squirrel Hill Point of Sale

    The shops system provides several features that are tailored to the small retailer who intends to survive on the basis of location, against larger chains.

    The point is to provide a relative improvement in ordering capabilities and information management on the basis of free software for the smaller guy - because this will still further increase the problem solving capabilities of communities.

    By utilizing the explosive capabilities of free software (derived from individuals, industry and academia alike), we can effectively represent the interests of small business.

    The key feature of our approach is integration via Debian GNU/Linux of existing software to perform important capabilities. In addition to shops, we are building a live linux distribution remastered from the Knoppix genre, called Shoppix, which includes shops, as well as a coherent installation containing many other free software systems which we will use to severely augment the shops system, which we add as part of our packaging effort.

    The main features of the shops system are:

    Version 0.9.5 includes the following features:

    • Automatic inventory reordering
      • Based on projected sales, current inventory
      • Maximize expected profit and customer satisfaction
      • Choose the cheapest supplier or the quickest one
    • Product locator (useful for rare items like surplus)
    • Tracking of all sales
      • Support for dynamic pricing to determine appropriate regional pricing
      • Ability to price differently to different demographics
      • Special handling of accounts
      • Automatic generation of window displays
    • Tracking of all requests
      • Ability to put items on order and contact customer when they arrive.
      • Tracking of product and service requests.
    • Tracking of all jobs
      • Barcodes for every job item
      • Ability to choose services from unlimited number of subcontractors
      • Detailed understand of pricing options
    • Agenda based employee management
      • Direct employee to perform certain operations well in advance of their deadline
      • Sensitive understanding of deadline options
      • Sophisticated time management planning, based on expected profit and customer satisfaction.

    Planned for Squirrel Hill POS system, Release 1.0

    • INVENTORY AQUISITION
      • Integration with agenda system - cost/benefit analysis
      • Sophisticated Supplier planning and Integration
      • Web based tracking using CSIMS/Ariadne/XWrapElite/etc
      • Ecommerce/Liquidation/Ebay asset aquisition
    • INVENTORY MANAGEMENT
      • Knowledge based inventory management
      • Ontological categorization of inventory using OpenCyc
      • Ability to select inventory by formula
      • Ability to group inventory, and edit inventory KBS
      • Learning of product equivalence classes (thanks to Gopi Flaherty)
      • Detect lemons - i.e. defective products
      • Object Oriented Management of Inventory classes using Perl OO
      • Allow poly of treatment of inventory
      • Whether internal use, repairs, returns, or stock.
      • Image based inventory management
      • Storage of product photographs
      • Displayable on Kiosks, e-commerce websites, Ebay and window displays
      • OCR of product information on labels.
      • Question Answering (NLP) applied to product labels and defaulting to WWW.
      • Wavelet-based image/product retrieval
      • similar products/categories.
      • Algebraicly closed operations
      • For dealing with inventory location
      • For dealing with inventory uncertainty
      • Customer face detection and recognition using OpenCV
      • Dynamic pricing
      • Sensitive mechanisms for pricing based on facial recognition and datamining of inventory KBS.
      • Reordering
      • Classes
      • Subcontractor Bulletin
      • Business Process Intelligent Tutoring Systems to Retain and Train Employees
      • Store Operations manager using PDDL2.2
      • Expert system representation of organizational tasks using Jess, Clips, opencyc or equivalent.
    • SECURITY
      • VSAM