The Camera Corner automates manual work with dakis

Where they started

When Ted stepped in, the store ran on a patchwork of systems that did not fit together. The sales counter ran on kiosks from three different providers, which he describes as a mess for customers and staff alike. The website was in rough shape, and the point of sale was an old, standalone system. A price change had to be entered in one place, then again in another. Rebates had to be updated everywhere by hand.

Ted runs payroll, accounts receivable, and much of the daily operation himself, so the duplication fell on him. He set out to simplify, starting with the kiosks. The store already used dakis for online photo finishing, so he consolidated the counter onto dakis too and retired the other systems.

“I was spending half my life sitting at a desk trying to get everything put through. Now I can be on the floor to help staff and sell, which is where I should be.”

Bringing it together

When Ted stepped in, the store ran on a patchwork of systems that did not fit together. The sales counter ran on kiosks from three different providers, which he describes as a mess for customers and staff alike. The website was in rough shape, and the point of sale was an old, standalone system. A price change had to be entered in one place, then again in another. Rebates had to be updated everywhere by hand.

Ted runs payroll, accounts receivable, and much of the daily operation himself, so the duplication fell on him. He set out to simplify, starting with the kiosks. The store already used dakis for online photo finishing, so he consolidated the counter onto dakis too and retired the other systems.

"There isn't an employee I could hire for what dakis costs a month. It's the best money I spend."

Key results

The clearest gains are the ones customers never see. dakis took the manual, repeatable work out of the operation, the double entry, the syncing, the data handling, and gave the time back to the store. For a small team, that time is the difference between being stuck at a desk and being out front.

Manufacturer instant rebates make the point. Vendors change rebate rules constantly, sometimes within days, and keeping them right is unforgiving. Ted once had two people managing rebates, and even then, wrong or unclaimed rebates cost the store tens of thousands of dollars over several years. A rebate entered at last week's amount, honored at the counter but never reimbursed, turns a thin margin into a loss.

dakis now manages the store's instant rebates, keeping each one current so the store stays priced right without carrying the work. Ted measures the value plainly: the monthly fee is a fraction of what the labor cost, and far less than the losses it prevents. 

“Why pay labor every day when a fraction of that can go to dakis for the same work, done right?”

What Ted values across all of it is the math a small store lives by. The work dakis handles would cost far more in wages, and would still come with the human error that creeps in when a small team is stretched too thin. 

Ted is not one to stand still. A website refresh is in the works, moving to a newer editor that will let the store make more of its own changes, and he is steadily automating the lab and fulfillment work further, down to routing certain orders to their own printers so nothing gets missed. Each change removes another step and another chance for error. dakis is the system he keeps building on.