Maintaining Data Quality in your EPoS

For many businesses, their Electronic Points of Sale (EPoS) can be a key aspect of their operations containing lots of important and sensitive data. However, with multiple employees accessing and editing this data, it can quickly become disorganised and confusing. Therefore, maintaining data quality is essential for ensuring seamless operations.  

But what does data quality mean? Data quality ensures that the information within a system is accurate, complete, consistent, timely, and unique. 

Let’s consider these five areas and how they relate to your EPoS system: 

Accuracy  

Accuracy is used to measure if the data represents the real-world scenarios or events,  ensuring every value is plausible. This is important because accurate data ensures that real-world operations can proceed as planned or expected. 

For example, this may include ensuring that only the correct products are available for purchase within the EPoS system. In Pursuit, a leading EPoS solution, this is achieved by assigning the appropriate product status – Current, Discontinued or Archived. These statuses can be used to clarify the following information: 

• Current – The product is available and can be purchased. 

• Discontinued – The product is no longer supplied, but existing stock can be sold on sale.    

• Archived – The product is out of stock and unlikely to ever be back in stock. 

This ensures that the available products match those physically in stock, reducing errors such as overselling discontinued or archived items. 

Completeness 

Data completeness ensures that all essential information is present. When considering this, it is important to note that this does not require 100% of your fields to be filled but rather those critical to the system. Therefore, it’s crucial to determine which fields are essential and which are optional. 

Within an EPoS environment, this can be implemented by ensuring necessary product fields are correctly filled out. These fields usually include: 

• Stock – For stock, it’s important to ensure that it is added to the correct branch and stock field. These stock fields typically consist of available stock, purchase order stock, stock in transit for customer delivery, and many others. This ensures that the correct products are available for purchase. 

• Prices – It’s also critical to set price fields. These fields allow you to set not only the main product price but a sale price as well. Therefore, ensuring that the correct price is displayed when a customer makes a purchase.  

• Supplier – It can also be beneficial to set Supplier fields because this clarifies which supplier product stock needs to be ordered from. This, therefore, makes it quicker for needed stock to be requested during the purchasing process. 

• Descriptions – Setting descriptions for Products within your EPoS can be helpful. This allows you to provide a product synopsise to inform customers and employees quickly. Helping all to get an understanding of the product quickly

• Properties – Key properties such as Product Type, Brand or Material are helpful to be set. This provides extra information to your customers and employees, allowing all parties to understand better

By completing these fields, businesses can centralise product information, reducing miscommunication and operational errors. 

Consistency  

Data consistency ensures that values do not conflict or duplicate across the system. This is crucial for eliminating confusion and enhancing usability. 

For example, standardising product SKUs prevents duplication and makes it easier to search for products. At Autify, we recommend using a structured format based on the sector, department, and group. For example, an Omega Seamaster Aqua Terra watch might follow this SKU format: 

• Sector = Watch 

• Department = Omega 

• Group = Seamaster 

• Final SKU = WATC-OMEG-SEAM-00003705 

Adopting this format ensures that all your SKUs are consistent and well-structured, making it easier for employees to understand and work with the system efficiently. 

Timelessness 

Timelessness data means that it is available when expected or needed. This allows businesses to respond quickly to changes in demand, stock levels, and customer needs, enhancing operational efficiency, customer satisfaction, and profitability. 

Timelessness is particularly important when corresponding with product stock within an EPoS system. Incorrect stock data can lead to orders being placed that cannot be fulfilled, disrupting operations and frustrating customers. To resolve this issue, Autify have developed integrations between EPoS system, Pursuit, and Content Management Systems (CMS) like Shopify, WordPress and Magento 2. This integration automatically updates stock levels when an order is placed on your website, minimising stock errors and improving operational efficiency  

This principle also applies to other business management tools like Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems, which help organisations manage internal processes. This is because incorrect purchasing or manufacturing managed by these systems can lead to disorganisation and a decline in customer satisfaction. Autify also offers integrations between ERP systems like MD 365 Business Central and CMS platforms such as Shopify, BigCommerce, and Magento 2. These integrations provide enhanced visibility across business operations & ensure precise stock control.   

If these solutions could benefit your business, contact our team today to learn more. 

Validity 

Validity ensures that data conforms to an expected format or range, making it usable across many different systems. 

For example, this should be considered when thinking about image sizes & character limits: 

• Image Sizes – Large product image files can slow down EPoS systems and other systems connected to it like websites. At Autify, we recommend keeping image sizes between 100-200KB in order to optimise both system performance and load times. 

• Character Limits – Fields like Product Name should adhere to character limits so that consistency is maintained across all platforms. 

Maintaining data quality in your EPoS system is crucial for ensuring smooth operations, minimising errors, and delivering an enhanced customer experience. By prioritising accuracy, completeness, consistency, timeliness, and validity, your EPoS system can serve as a reliable foundation for your business. While this blog provides a starting point for implementing data quality within your EPoS system, if you require further assistance or information, please don’t hesitate to contact our team!