DSS
(App, USA)
A contraption I wrote for UniJewel, as per David's instructions, once I managed to grab these instructions partly by head partly by tail, to churn daily heaps of excel sheets, some twenty megabytes altogether, about the sales of stones in Sam's club (the posh division of Walmart), and probably Costco and one more place, though I don't remember we ever had any data from those other places, that was probably just a slot for future expansion.
The thing is solidly complicated... For one, the method of sales. Walmart, i.e. Sam's club, doesn't buy the goods, just provides the shelf space and personnel, and takes a margin. Tracking the goods, stimulation of sales, delivery of goods and other logistics are on the supplier. That's where Walmart provides some tools, namely the suppliers can download complete data about their stock per location, to see where which items sell and which don't, and then to push the good going ones and recall the duds. Someone there had a bright idea of neighborly swap, so in places where cost of transfer is negligible, and if a) item A and item B exist in both the first and the second shop, b) are priced the same, v) A sells well in the first shop and B doesn't, and it's vice versa in the second shop - then they can swap a certain quantity, may everything go to places where it sells well.
Which was, taken all together, interestng and would probably bring some extra coin. I remember from back in stour that the largest cost of commerce is the value of goods in storage, that's bound money waiting for its turnover. I even wrote a stock analysis report, which was basically the theoretical interest on that value, and they found a lot of stuff that way, the forgotten items for which the demand increased meanwhile, or there's simply shortage of them, this is where they made lots of money suddenly.
In this case my first task was to automate the download of data from Walmart's side. David even went to Bentonville to some meeting about that, and he got me a name and password, and I was to manage from there. Of course, once I had access to such an internal website, I had to take a peek into the html there, to see how did they do that, what comments have the programmers left. I remembered two things: „under no circumstances touch any of the code between this marker and the next, this is where we access the data from Fortran, nobody knows what's going on in there“. Ow yeah, great, if it was written for commerce in Fortran, it must be old at least thirty years. So far all the writers of it have dispersed - some to greener pastures, some six feet under, some retired.
The other thing was something in javascript, where it checks for the visitor's browser, and then „if it's m$ explorer, then we use this workaround... I know it's retarded and pedestrian, but fuck it, even this barely works“.
Anyway, somewhere in there was a link to the page where I could download the export into a text file, some 3-4 megabytes a day, starting on 5th october 2004. From those, after extensive crunching and munching, the data were extracted and reports churned, all in excel, and were stored somewhere on disk. After a while the general overview of what should go where was not enough, so we added a separate report for each item, with its distribution of sales, good and bad, and suggestions where to swap it, with graphs (which, if you ask me, all look more or less the same), and even a photo (though for 2000 items we had about 490 photos, so used similar ones). And, again, I wonder if anyone even looked at those.
As even today I don't know whether they ever performed an item swap by this scheme. Perhaps a few tries in the beginning, to just make a showcase, which may have lasted a couple of weeks. Regardless, this regularly milked the data and distilled them into reports until at least september 2005. Probably even later, it's just that I stopped bringing sample files home after that. Sufficient satisfaction is that David could boast being so smart and skilled to be able to make this work.
The name should be an abbreviation of something, which I forgot within the hour.
Mentions: 05-X-2004., 15-X-2004., 23-X-2004., David Krakovski, Majkrosoft (m$), stour, UniJewel, in serbian