WordWise Case Study

General Description :

WordWise is a small organisation that sells children's books, both via a shop and mail-order. They are based on the ground floor of a maisonette in Tulse Hill in South London, where two rooms function as the shop, which is open in normal shop hours for the general public. There is also a basement, which functions as a warehouse where additional copies of books are kept. Currently, WordWise has about 15,000 titles in stock, either on the shelves, where they are organised in age and subject groupings, or in the basement, where they are organised in alphabetical order of the author. The current value of the stock is about £27,000. The business is generally doing very well.

Basic Operations :

WordWise is managed and owned by a husband and wife team, Harry and Dora Read. They took early retirement from primary teaching posts in order to concentrate on the business, which reflects their passionate commitment to promoting the cause of children's reading. Three part-time assistants are employed, supposedly to help run the office, but in truth they have more knowledge about children's' psychology than about clerical procedures !

Passing trade in the shop accounts for some of WordWise's business, but the majority of its income derives from orders from libraries and schools. A monthly catalogue of the latest recommended titles is sent out to customers. The preparation of this catalogue and the selection of the titles is the key expression of the expertise of the WordWise staff, and a lot of care is spent over it. In addition, WordWise will organise exhibitions of books, which can of course be bought, at schools, so that teachers and children can examine books on their own premises.

Information Needs :

The major need is to keep track of stock and to make sure that appropriate stock levels are maintained. There are two big problems with this at the moment. Firstly, when books are sent out on exhibition, a list of prices is sent out with each box of books. This is produced on an adding machine, and a copy is retained in the office, so that the total value of stock released is known. Unfortunately, however, no other information is included ! Therefore, when unsold books are returned, together with the cash for books sold (less a 7% discount), although one can see whether the correct money has been returned, and also whether any books have not been paid for, it is hard to work out what has actually been sold, (or stolen), since the only record is staff memory.

Secondly, there is no clear procedure for re-ordering stock from the publishers. Currently, orders tend to be submitted by Harry Read, when he has time, usually in the evening at home, since he and Dora are so busy during the day. Sometimes this can lead to embarrassment when books featured in the catalogue are found to have sold out without anyone noticing. This happened recently when Granada TV put on a repeat of Raymond Brigg's story "The Snowman", and lots of orders came in the next day. Another problem with stock is deciding at what point to cut your losses and sell off unpopular books at reduced prices. And deciding what is a sensible minimum stock level in the first place.

Operational Details :

When books are sold over the counter, the sales person records the ISBN of each book, together with its price. (ISBN stands for International Standard Book Number, and is a unique number for each book published).

At the end of each day, the list of books sold in this way is used to replenish the shelves from the stock held in the basement. Any outages are noted on a separate list, and the two lists are stapled together and put in a file labelled "Sales". This is one of the files taken home by Harry when re-ordering cannot be put off any longer.

Orders on the mail-order side can arrive on order forms from the catalogue, or they can be telephoned in. Orders received by post are dealt with in the morning by one of the part-time workers, Sarah Harrison, and she also handles telephone orders that come in before lunch-time, when she goes home. Books are either sent off straight away, with an invoice, in which case the order is stamped "Sent" and put in a file labelled "Orders Sent", or, if the books are not in stock, the order is put in a file labelled "Orders Pending". Harry takes these home too.

Telephone orders that come in the afternoon are generally written down by the sales person, in between his other duties, and put on the desk that Sarah works at in the morning, so that she can send them off next day. Dora uses this desk too, to look at new books, and prepare the catalogue, and orders sometimes get lost altogether, or turn up weeks later in strange and unexpected places.

© LEV