PREVENTING LOST ORDERS

Founded in 1978 by Paul and Carol Smith, Northridge Hills Liquor began as a corner liquor store with a modest wine selection in the USA, California. The store evolved into a wine specialty shop and grew continuously. In 1998 it moved to its current location in Woodland Hills. They were also an early adopter of e-commerce, allowing to serve customers 24/7 with the finest wines.

With e-commerce becoming an important part of the business, Jon Morgan joined the team and is responsible for all digital processes. Part of this is maintaining and monitoring the integration of the website with the retail management system.

Website orders stuck in EDI

A web service pulls customers’ orders from the website and stores them in a Microsoft SQL database. A stored procedure converts the data into orders for the retail management system. These are processed by the sales team through a front-end application.

Jon explains this is not always flawless: “Every 6 months or so, we’ll find that an order gets downloaded from our website and imported into the staging tables, but doesn’t get built into an order. An error flag is generated in the database but if no-one is looking, it gets lost pretty quickly.”

Monitoring with AutoSQL

To make sure customers are not affected by such errors, Jon set up a monitoring system. The challenge was to get only triggered when something was wrong: “I had done some work with SSIS to export data to a text file and email it to me with a SendMail app, but it was clunky and it sent me an email every 2 hours.”

When searching online for a better solution, Jon found AutoSQL and started a trial. “I tested AutoSQL and within 10 minutes I knew it was exactly what we needed. I love that I now have a way to track all sorts of ‘once in a blue moon’ events in our database and can send emails only when one of these events actually happens.”

Happy customers

With the monitoring system in place, all customers get their orders on time and can enjoy the finest wines from Woodland Hills. Jon Morgan: “Purchasing AutoSQL was an easy decision. Best money I’ve spent in quite some time.”