P-Cubed: Web-Centric Fresh Item Management

P-Cubed (Perishable Production Planning) tracks meat, bakery and deli
department inventory received, produced, sold, marked down and thrown
away through a web-centric thin client web-browser in-store user interface.

You are probably more used to using web-centric applications than you
realize: When you use your web browser for online banking, travel booking
and online purchases you are interacting directly with the bank/airline/retailers web server. When you choose to print your bank statement/itinerary/purchase confirmation, the print comes off your local home printer and is not printed at the banks/airline/retailers web serve location. P-Cubed is exactly the same, except that the whole application is running behind your corporate fire-wall over your private internet or 'intranet' rather than over the public internet.

P-Cubed is designed to leverage Internet technology with your investment in the TCP/IP Wide Area Network (WAN) or Intranet connecting all of your store locations to your headquarters. The P-Cubed Central Web Server uses a single database that is internally able to keep each stores data distinct from other stores and from the headquarters data. This data can be accessed by an in-store user through dynamic HTML generated by the central web-server on any device in the store that has a web browser.

The web browser user interface behaves like a typical public Internet application and so is extremely user friendly. Each store user is segmented to only get access to their store and department's data based on the store number and permissions associated with their log-in. The system administrator can be control what each user is allowed to do with the system.

Web-centric architecture benefits:

• There is no software to install into the store, simply a short-cut on each web browser pointing to the central web-server.
• There is no database or software to maintain in the store.
• The application is very scaleable - yahoo and google are world-wide web-centric applications using the same architecture and technology.
• Upgrades to the application are applied centrally just once and are instantly available to all store users.
• The application is operating-system and web-browser neutral. The web-browser can run on Windows or Linux; P-cubed neither knows nor cares.