Upgrading Our Computer System, Day One

In the midst of me finishing up A Short History of Women (book club tonight at 7), we are changing over our computer system from Legacy IBID to IBIDie (which I think stands for internet edition).

This has been in the works a long time, surviving a sale of the inventory company, and due to delays, a switch at Schwartz to another spinoff system, The Hub.

But this is different. The necessity is that we can no longer find replacement parts for much of our system. Here's some of our new system at left, set up "Goldilocks and the Three Bears" style.

Jason has taken on this task, getting us ready for the big day, or rather night, as the data transfer takes nine hours. Alas, it didn't quite work the way we expected. I'm sure you're shocked.

The only change that customers are seeing is that temporarily, we can't sell or redeem gift cards.

Our credit card info processing is changing a bit. But since everything seems to somehow go through First Data, it's just a case of moving from subsidiary 23 to 84 and adding on 56 (which would be icverify).

I'm pretty happy about the change. There are a lot of things we're going to be able to do with the new system, and our old system is jerry-rigged to do things like stock checks with wholesalers. Our credit card processing and electronic ordering will be by internet, not phone, which should speed things up quite a bit.

What else is going on today? This morning I ordered four reams of Christmas wrap, plus one ream of kids paper. Alas, we might be out of our balloon paper for a few days. The new kids' wrap is very different--monkeys with balloons. You didn't know that balloon = child's present in book lingo.

We still had five rolls of wrap left from last year (or perhaps from before--they were part of the asset purchase) but they are not full rolls. We also have one Chanukah wrap. It's very nice and should get us through this season.