Technology and Management Functions
Brent Chapman
TEC/401
November 22, 2012
Dziorny

Technology and Management Functions
As the world of business grows and evolves, technology as all things in the business world must evolve. With this said, properly managing and work force to embrace new technology and receive the greatest return on investment is very challenging. Managers must plan, organize, lead and communicate all of the new aspects of said technology along to their teams in a way that fosters buy in and acceptance. Fastenal has had some upgrades recently to their point of sales system (P.O.S) and I have had privilege of leading a group consisting of myself and four others through the training and implementing process.
PLANNING
The upgrade to our POS was the brain child of our new president Lee Hind. For several years we have struggled with raising our company pretax margin to the same level as before 2009. What the board and president wanted to end up with was a better way for stores and people in front of the customers to have access to as much data as possibly in order to give our customers the most competitive price possible along with making pricing much more efficient. What they planned on doing was building an addition to the pos that showed sales transactions per part number from across the company. Everything from last price paid to the amount of inventory sold. Previously stores had to make an educated guess on what price was fair or competitive for that specific customer. Many steps were involved because there was not a set procedure in place for the company. Calling vendors for pricing and availability, last price paid for customer and availability were only a few of the steps we had to answer when pricing came into question.
ORGANIZING
Organizing this data along with all of the personnel training was going to be interesting to