Bassett's Dairy Automates Pricing and Inventory System with askSam's SDK

By Sue Ellen Sullivan

We operate a small milk distributorship in the North Florida area. We offer a wide selection of 120 different dairy products and deliver to over 300 customers. askSam created our first automated pricing system back in the early 90's in the DOS version of askSam. The purpose of the system was to replace our manual paper based system for an electronic one that could track product price changes for our customers, and make the whole process a lot easier.

The process we used then was: If a gallon of milk went up $.02 then we had to manually go through each customer folder, find the customers who ordered that product, change the price, retype a new price sheet, make one copy for their records, another for the customer and mail the new price sheet to the customer. This was a bit of a process since the prices fluxuated so often. Very often I would just be finishing a price change when it was time to start the next one You can imagine how frustrating this could be.

The askSam DOS system provided us with a way to electronically track the customer information and price list, make changes by simply clicking a button, and automatically printing a new price list to reflect the price changes. It also gave us a way to track the information about the products we supplied to customers.

When we decided to upgrade our pricing program to a Windows version we knew askSam could provide us with the answer we needed.

Our latest askSam application is even better, and it's web-based so we can manage price changes from anywhere in the world. This new askSam web-based system also has many enhancements to improve our productivity even more.

By using the askSam SDK engine and ASP programming, askSam has made our customer product/price management a convenient, easy to use system. Whereas this process used to consume most of my time, it can now be done in a few minutes.

Here are some of the main benefits we enjoy from our new system:

Ÿ     Automate price change process - saves time, convenient, much easier, more efficient.

Ÿ     Flexibility - change prices for all customers or individual customers

Ÿ     Tracks customer info and price lists - add, edit, delete, search and print customer info

Ÿ     Track product list - add, edit, delete, search and print product information

Ÿ     Manage Customer Product Lists - Add to or remove products from a customer

Ÿ     Easily print customer price changes and price sheets

Ÿ     Online file maintenance

Ÿ     Web Based - can be accessed from anywhere

The folks at askSam took the information given to them and created a custom pricing program for us that has become a real asset and a tremendous time saver off of our daily work load. Their willingness to work with us to try and meet our exact software needs within a limited time schedule proved to me that their knowledge in computer programming and customer satisfaction is A++. I highly recommend this team of professionals to any company needing to upgrade their software.

Sue Ellen Sullivan

Office Manager

Bassett's Dairy

bassettmilk@gtcom.net