Atlas Shop System
Great shops, happy customers
Atlas is a shop and business management system for small and medium enterprises (SMEs) to run their shops efficiently with minimal overhead and administrative burden. It is “friction free”, invisible computing.
Synopsys
With Atlas SMEs will be able to manage shops, guarantees and servicing, warehouses, inventories, expenditures, receivables, loans, orders, business to business (B2B) data exchange, accounting data exchange, workflows, cashiers/POS terminals, bank accounts, sales campaigns, web-shops, customer goodwill and retention, international and domestic trade in a unified, simple to use solution that provides key statistics for management to support decision making.
Although parts of this puzzle are very well served by established products, no solution exists that integrates all these functions and augments them with web technologies to make maintenance, data exchange, and web-shops possible at costs suitable for SMEs.
Key Benefits
To the shop owner/manager
- Running shops professionally requires skills and experience not always accessible for small and medium shops. Thus these enterprises are often run in an ad-hoc manner on the edge of chaos that results in unnecessarily large risk-taking, loss of business, and lost opportunities. Atlas provides a semi-automated best practice approach that makes professionally running a shop as simple as following a few easy rules.
- The virtually free added transparency will significantly reduce internal shoplifting and inventory tinkering while boosting shop assistant accountability and morale.
- Many owners/managers will have objective daily data about the performance of their shops and statistics on fire-sales, loss leaders, employee performance, and margins the first time in the history of their enterprises.
- This, together with easier management will let them focus more on building the business or spend more time with the family.
- Most SMEs don’t have in-house accountants and thus owners have to manage data exchange with them. With Atlas, all voucher information can be transferred to accountants without re-entry, making the accountant’s work more efficient and more cost effective. Accountants can also provide more timely (up-to-date) information to shop owners on key business health data.
- Business partners who are both on Atlas would be able to exchange voucher and other information on-line, making redundant and error prone re-entry unnecessary.
- Overall costs reductions from all the above benefits will immediately influence the bottom line.
- Satisfied customers and shop assistants will mean more business with less stress.
To the shop assistant
- Many times management expectations are not clear, performance recognition is based on anecdotal evidence. Atlas will make the shop assistant’s work-life more orderly and performance measurable.
- Objective accountability will protect shop assistants from questionable claims.
- Adding new products and managing information about existing products will be much easier with the product information exchange: if the product is already known to the system, then its properties will be automatically downloaded.
To the customer
- Timely and accurate information on products and services.
- Better overall service due to better managed shops.
- Shopping history will let them check guarantee coverage and do repeat shopping with ease.
System Overview
Atlas has a centralized Core that is responsible for license management, information exchange, upgrades, global security, data backup, and web-shop operation, plus it is running the Atlas business processes (invoicing, etc.). This part can be hosted and managed by the client or by PannonRex.
Atlas in-shop systems are optimized for high performance and ease of use. They can operate even if on-line access is impossible due to temporal technical issues. Today they are built on .NET technologies and as web technologies mature they will be moved to rich web applications. Automatic maintenance (upgrades, backups, health metrics) will ensure smooth operations. They also contain all business critical data, making sure that the privacy of data is guaranteed (all business-specific information exchanged through or backed up to the Core will be encrypted.).
The on-line web-shop is a state-of-the-art GWT (Google Web Toolkit) Web 2.0 solution that connects to the Core directly for instant synchronization.
