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.
Alison -
I'll give this a look. It might work for us, though both idea's rely on the user, which could lead to errors in the data.
What I was hoping for was something more behind-the-scenes, where I didn't have to rely on a human.
Still worth looking at.
Thanks.
John -
I'll look into this idea. Was hoping for something more behind-the-scenes (so to speak) that didn't rely on the operator to make a selection.
Still worth trying.
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.
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).