A Case Study

The Stanford Store is a completely student-run business and is a division of Stanford Student Enterprises (SSE) at the Stanford University. Since its founding in 1995, the Stanford Store has been the premier Stanford apparel retailer offering low-priced, high-quality Stanford merchandise to the flamboyant Stanford crowd.

The situation

Stanford Store has a varied inventory of apparels and other accessories ranging from tees to key rings. The staff had to manage the point-of-sale system and the online store separately, which was a matter of repetitive work. The same product was entered twice in two disparate systems and processed separately costing resources critical for a non-profit organization devoted to students' causes. Moreover, the inventory management was a nightmare. After getting an online order, they would separately feed the transaction in the RMS for general record-keeping purposes. Manual data entry of orders created errors, thus, costing more money.

The solution

"LAN Services was recommended to us and they had prior experience integrating shopping cart with RMS." said Brian Tolkin, one of the senior business managers at Stanford Store, when asked why they opted for LAN Services. Since the basic purpose of the project is to synchronize the online storefront with the RMS running at the store, Stanford Store's business managers reviewed project plan and did a cost-return analysis for a possible windows server.

"For our particular market, our business should be the first place that potential customers will turn", emphasizes Brian. Naturally, to reduce the huge running cost (which they were incurring additionally) and achieve a greater probability in terms of reaching new customers, the think-tank at Stanford Store welcomed the proposed solution from LAN Services.

The team at LAN Services now had other points to cover:

• Help the Stanford IT team to set the server
• Analyze and integrate the design theme given by Stanford Store
• Setup the online store system in the new server
• Complete the customization requirement with feature enhancements
• Set up RMSlink – the web integrator that would synchronize the RMS and the online storefront
• Complete testing and functional analysis

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