POS Cable management

Quixotic.Estate · April 5, 2017

Hey LTT,

So i'm currently working on a project for about 18 of my convenience stores. Our Point of Sales systems were totally replaced about three years ago, before I took a very technical role in my company. Each register, cash drawer, customer display, scanner, credit card terminal and security camera are connected via ethernet.

Well, the company that configured and wired the stores did a real POS job. ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)

We are talking ZERO cable management. Really bad RJ45 terminations. Ugh, Its a mess...

Being the super busy business executive fancy pants that I am, I really cant justify going to each location and getting measurements for each and every cable. I have ballparks, but nothing suitable for ordering each and every cable. The reason why I need to buy pre terminated Cat7 cables is each one of these jobs will have to be done overnight when the store is not operating and be totally done 4 hours later when the store reopens. I just don't think I would be able to efficiently crimp every cable.

I will run and take some pictures of one of my locations if theres any interest. I've got all the time in the world for you guys!

So tl;dr Any tips or suggestions for big cable management prep? Recommendations for friendly, helpful cable providers? (Talked to CableSYS, no real help.) High volume RJ45 crimp tools?

Thanks!

RudePlayers · April 5, 2017

The question you need to ask is will organizing the cables increase how profitable each store is and your ability to expand in the future.

Quixotic.Estate · April 5, 2017

1 hour ago, RudePlayers said:

The question you need to ask is will organizing the cables increase how profitable each store is and your ability to expand in the future.

The answer is yes. When something fails, a quick repair is crucial. Downtime not only kills sales at that moment, but normally destroys our relationships with customers. Someone who enters a convenience store is looking for just that, convenience. They are absolutely loyal until something prevents them for getting on with their day. The average time you have a customer in your store is 15-45 seconds. anything longer then that and you risk losing that specific sale to a competitor. A wait time more than 270 seconds, you risk losing that customer for good. Being able to trouble shoot problems faster over the phone with labeling and color coating cables to assist otherwise nontechnically inclined managers while running remote diagnostics the second something goes wrong, would logically increase LCV. Thus creating more opportunity to make more sales, which ends with a larger amount of profit. So cable management may look unnecessary directly, In all reality you take a pretty big hit asking a manager that doesn't know the difference between the two examples of RJ45s i've attached.

Quixotic.Estate · April 5, 2017

LCV = Lifetime Customer Value btw.

Very good point though. I've definitely done my homework on this one.

Blake · April 6, 2017

8 hours ago, Quixotic.Estate said:

LCV = Lifetime Customer Value btw.

Very good point though. I've definitely done my homework on this one.

Do up an actual costing for each hour that the site is down, i.e. ~ $20/hr in wages + 1/8500 for rental costs (hours in the year) + Lost sales (average revenue/profit your choice) = $LostRevenue. Now you have your assumptions that you can tell the execs. Next assuming your running windows (you can do this in Linux also), pan through the last 365 days worth of event logs looking at shutdown and startup times, assuming 525600 minutes in the year and 100% up time, you can take away the times that the system was down (assuming 24 hours sites, otherwise you'll have some more logic to filter out downtime from outside trading hours). Now you can take $DownTimeInHours * $LostRevenue = $shittonnemorethencostofredundancy. Now repeat for each store, if you have a few stores that are not really busy and might not be worth it you can consider playing with the numbers (i.e. show totals for the fleet only), so the larger stores losses inflate the smaller stores.

Use that to justify redundant POS systems, get them installed, properly cable managed. then just take your time shutting down the shit ones and doing it correctly. 18 sites? that will take you 18 weeks if your very lazy. Added benefit of this? Shit breaks, at least you can sleep in till a decent hour rather then running out at 2am due to a POS down issue / fire.

Exec sees a money figure and can make a judgement. If they don't go with it, negotiate a higher on call fee, keep cranking it up till it is fiscally stupid to not go for your plan... or make bank for a few years till you need to sleep again.

This will also make POS Hardware refreshes (which are coming close to due, seeing as your systems are 3 years old).

Quixotic.Estate · April 6, 2017

15 minutes ago, Blake said:

Do up an actual costing for each hour that the site is down, i.e. ~ $20/hr in wages + 1/8500 for rental costs (hours in the year) + Lost sales (average revenue/profit your choice) = $LostRevenue. Now you have your assumptions that you can tell the execs. Next assuming your running windows (you can do this in Linux also), pan through the last 365 days worth of event logs looking at shutdown and startup times, assuming 525600 minutes in the year and 100% up time, you can take away the times that the system was down (assuming 24 hours sites, otherwise you'll have some more logic to filter out downtime from outside trading hours). Now you can take $DownTimeInHours * $LostRevenue = $shittonnemorethencostofredundancy. Now repeat for each store, if you have a few stores that are not really busy and might not be worth it you can consider playing with the numbers (i.e. show totals for the fleet only), so the larger stores losses inflate the smaller stores.

Use that to justify redundant POS systems, get them installed, properly cable managed. then just take your time shutting down the shit ones and doing it correctly. 18 sites? that will take you 18 weeks if your very lazy. Added benefit of this? Shit breaks, at least you can sleep in till a decent hour rather then running out at 2am due to a POS down issue / fire.

Exec sees a money figure and can make a judgement. If they don't go with it, negotiate a higher on call fee, keep cranking it up till it is fiscally stupid to not go for your plan... or make bank for a few years till you need to sleep again.

This will also make POS Hardware refreshes (which are coming close to due, seeing as your systems are 3 years old).

Perhaps I didn't explain myself well enough. I've done the cost/benefit. Thats all done with the conclusion that It's prudent for these 18 locations to take care of the cable management at this point .

I myself am upper management... Some corporate peeps take more of an interest working in the field than most would expect.

I really just need ideas for suppliers who provide bulk pre terminated cables, tips on how to do a project like this efficiently. I've done smaller projects, and can personally troubleshoot any actual issues that may arise. But of course that will add time to the project. I'm just looking for guidelines others have experienced doing similar projects that could help me out.

It just doesn't seem that theres a manual on cable management. lol.