Randy Nichols

The communication hub of Alco Stores, Inc. It allows stores and the general office to communicate in an unprecedented manner. Over the years, we've changed the architecture to keep up with increased load and a wider audience to keep response times acceptable.

At first, it provided real-time dashboards to store associates allowing them to better manage activity. Now, it includes task delegation, an extensive content management system, and dashboards for virtually every department.

We managed over a million customers and over $1.4 billion in sales over the course of several years. The program required minimal edits to the existing point-of-sale system and was robust through its entire duration. Extensive testing and documentation provided the foundation for its success.

With a weekly send of over 3 million emails, rising costs influenced marketing to take email distribution in-house. Since marketing was already creating PDFs to define emails, we kept that part of the workflow and authored a system to give marketing the means to slice the PDF themselves, define where the click would land and distribute to different distribution lists through a PowerMTA setup.

At first, Marketing wanted IT to be engaged in all the email sends since that was their history with our consultants. By giving them great tools and training them to take more ownership of the process, we eliminated that dependency and empowered them to act with greater freedom. We sent millions of personally-tailored emails each week for years without any issue.

Alco elected to list our store inventory on an eCommerce site and enable stores to fulfill the orders by shipping directly to the customer.

Store associates signed in with their familiar point-of-sale credentials and received a list of orders to fulfill. It dispatched the order to the optimal store based on real-time inventory monitoring, distance to the customer, and current order load.

I learned to never underestimate the value of elegant simplicity. The interface presented the basics needed by the stores to fulfill the orders. This made training new fulfillment stores easier. Fewer moving parts required less to document and maintain.

My work with Toptal has been in private intranet sites or behind the scene startups. I'm most pleased with the heart to keep the interfaces clean and usable.