I'm starting this post in hopes that there may be a way to build a dashboard (or, if not a dashboard, a report) that could provide metrics related to sales volumes by device/location of device.
Use case: We have a very porous campus, with five buildings (four of which contain exhibitions space). Visitors can enter through and purchase entry at, any one of at least three different admission desks. We are planning to open a fourth (which has been closed since the pandemic shut things down). Management would like to be able to gauge the volume of transactions happening at each desk.
As a hosted site, I wasn't able to find a reliable way to collect and present the volume of sales for memberships and tickets at each desk - there doesn't seem to be a way to make a collection of devices (like you can with NScan devices) that will deliver the total number of tickets or memberships sold on a Point-of-Sale device. Confounding the issue more is the fact that our admissions desk attendants move around - so the Seats and Tickets cube element "Created by" won't work. Someone may be at Desk 1 part of the day and Desk 2 later (to facilitate lunches and breaks). Someone suggested creating a Mode-of-Sale for each PoS location but we would end up with at least 20 MoS;s - that just seemed completely unruly.
What would be great is a way to group the computers that are at each desk into a collection and report on the membership sales and ticket sales as a percentage of the days sales for the whole campus. We've done something similar with our NScan devices, so we can see where the traffic is flowing through the exhibitions.
Is anyone doing anything like this? If not in analytics, the only way to do this might be to create a local table and build a custom report to aggregate the data but this would be perfect for Analytics, if the data elements existed in the cubes.
Any ideas or direction would be greatly appreciated.
Hi Phillip - forgive me as I don't know anything about the hosting environment but we have done this before using machine location as each of our point of sale tills device ID is in that table.
Can you expand on that...I looked at that table but was unable to link that through to individual transactions.
The machine location is returned in the create_loc column
we used
Select distinct o.order_no ,p.perf_no ,o.customer_no ,o.MOS ,o.create_loc ,h.num_seats_pur ,h.num_seats_ret ,p.perf_dtfrom T_ORDER o (nolock)join T_LINEITEM h (nolock)on o.order_no = h.order_noJoin T_SUB_LINEITEM s (nolock)on h.order_no = s.order_noJoin T_PERF p (nolock)on p.perf_no = h.perf_nowhere perf_dt between '2022-09-04' and '2022-09-20'and p.prod_season_no = 140040
and then pivoted the results to see which entry was being used more. Would be interested in how you get on with getting it into Analytics!
Thanks for the code Jo. In our case the create_loc isn't going to work because the data in that field is the user name and not the actual machine name. I believe this is due to us being on Tessitura Hosting. It appears that when a user logs in though Citrix, what is being written in the create_loc field is not the actual device ID (like the windows device ID or some other assigned value that is related to the physical machine), but a virtual device ID that contains the user name found in the table TX_MACHINE_NAME. Because our users move around to various physical devices, those ID's can't be mapped to a specific location, as the machine_name field in TX-MACHINE_LOCATION is their login, which is where I'm assuming the application gets the create_loc value.
Really thinking this is going to have to be something custom.
sorry it's not going to work for you - good luck!
Hi Phillip,
I concur with the value of being able to report by sales location and didn't personally realize that we store the user IDs in Hosting for the location. Would you be willing to create an Idea for this... that the [create_loc] audit columns throughout Tessitura, and the TX_MACHINE_LOCATION machine name store the actual machine name for hosted members rather than the TNHS\UserID?
Especially because that data IS known. You can see that information in the self service portal where you see open Citrix sessions. That said, I wonder if the sunset of Citrix will cause issues with the idea of being able to report on machine location like that. For a browser-based application to be able to report on the machine loading it seems like a different idea than a Citrix connected device.
Granted, I still support the creation of the idea and the desire for that reporting in general, I am just not entirely sure how one would best go about it.
John -
I've been experimenting with your idea of using Order Category. We are on v15 and I'd like a solution that could be transitioned to v16 easily. Since the Order Category functionality in v16 is a bit more robust than v15 (the category appears to be sticky, so the operator doesn't have to reset it for every order), this might be the way to go. It's also available in the Seats & Tickets cube. What I don't like is that it isn't available on the QuickSale screen. If we could modify the QS screen to include it, the hassle of clicking on the Order Details tab to set it goes away.
Looking to get an answer to both of those issues.
If we can't come up with something more user friendly, and the issue with modifying the QS screen and having to set the Order Category for every order may push us toward Alison's recommendation of using Batch Types.
No perfect solution so far, so I took Chris's advice and put an idea on the Ideas board. You can vote on it here.
Voted. And that makes sense. And, I DO understand why the QuickSale screen might not have an order category, as it is supposed to be something that allows for "quick sales", thus, eliminating as many things as possible is good. But maybe there is a way to get that added there in some fashion, whether a default or additional option or something, too (I am extremely unfamiliar with the QuickSale screens since we do not use them here).
Alternatively, one could keep that column and then add an additional column called "machine_name" (matching the column name in TX_MACHINE_LOCATION).