This past week I attended
a seminar with a group of leading golf professionals. One of the breakout sessions was on POS
systems and the consensus of this particular group was that the Web Based application
was the way of the future and that all of your troubles would go away when we
eventually get there. No more disk space
to worry about, system crashes, backups, etc.
Since I was not an actual
participant of this breakout group, I could only listen and bite my lip. Since all 10 or so of the pros in the group
seemed to concur that Web Based applications would one day be their Magic
Bullet, I am going to take this opportunity to tell you why, with that Magic
Bullet, you are playing Russian Roulette.
Murphy's Law: If something can go
wrong, it will go wrong and do so at the worst possible time. If you lose your Internet connection, your
POS system (tee sheet, inventory, customer records, etc.) is down. This may not happen often but it happens, and
it will happen at 8am on a sunny Saturday morning or at noon when you have your
Ladies Invitational coming up with a 1pm shotgun.
Value: The cost of your
computer system (even if it is in the $50,000 range) is not where the value
lies. The value is the DATA you
collect. If this data suddenly
disappears, that $50K software package may as well be a copy of Donkey
Kong. You should NEVER have your data in
the hands of someone else.
History: "Those who
cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it," George Santayana, philosopher
(1905). Fast forward to the year 2000 (or
somewhere around there), the year of the great dot com financial crash. Among the slaughter was a company called
Greens.com. Backed by the PGA, I
believe, this company rolled out an Internet based web application for Tee
Times and some limited POS capability.
Long story short is that this company went bankrupt and without notice
to employees or customers, suddenly turned out the lights and locked the
doors. To make matters worse, they had a
disgruntled employee with access to the web servers. This employee deleted all of the data on the
servers.
Lesson: The
fallout from this was that thousands of golf shops that entrusted their tee
sheet inventory to Greens.com came in the next morning to find the web site was
down, the support phone lines were disconnected, and all of their tee sheet and
POS data was lost forever! Millions of
dollars in tee sheet bookings and data were lost and there was not a damn thing
anyone could do about it.
FYI: This was a
substantial boom to CPS since we always house the data locally in the
shop. Many of our current customers were
casualties of the Greens.com fiasco and will be happy to share their story with
you.
The Truth: Of
course there are great benefits to the Internet and the truth of the matter is
that the place to be is somewhere in the middle. This is our core design philosophy at CPS: The
data belongs to the customer. As
such, the data should be 100% in the customer's control. The data lives on the customer's computer in
the customer's facility. The Internet
can and should be used to access and update that data. This includes On-Line Tee Times, On-Line Web
Store, running your POS remotely over the Internet, etc. What this does NOT mean is that you should
have an ASP (Active Server Pages) web application with your data housed on
someone else's servers. Business or
environmental crises on our part should not be a burden on your part. Hands down, we have the most advanced
technology product on the market. This
includes both local and Internet based applications. If you ever get caught up in the fantasy of
ASP web based utopia, talk to us about the risks you are flirting with before
you pull that trigger.
Enjoy