Employees of the Wildcat Store found themselves undergoing a full system change in October.
“We changed our point of sale systems in late October of last year. The system we’ve been on for several years basically went out of business, which forced a change for us,” Ryan Stewart, manager of course materials for Wildcat Stores, said.
According to Stewart, the process for selecting a new system took about six months. One of the challenges that emerged from adopting a new system mid-semester was they couldn’t test it during the peak time — the beginning of the semester.
“We were test driving it; we could drive it around the block, and it worked fine, but we didn’t take it on a cross country road trip,” Stewart said. “Back to school is that cross country road trip where we’re putting some miles on it.”
One immediate bump in the road they found themselves dealing with was the Day One Access system. The Day One Access system allows students to get required course materials, typically textbooks, digitally starting the first day of class.
“Day One Access is all managed through a web program called Connect. We put all the items in there, and the CRNs for the classes get linked to that book and activated,” Stewart said.
In spite of preparation, Stewart explained that a glitch in the new system caused more than half of the data to delete during the weekend prior to the start of the semester.
How the booklist is accessed and operates also changed with the new system. Now, students will have to look up courses and find required materials that way.
“Students that have ordered with us before on our website need to reset their password with their Weber credentials on the new one. Customers that haven’t ordered with us before need to create an account on our website,” Stewart said.
As with any update, system changes will take some getting used to. Despite the initial technical difficulties, Stewart felt things were back up and running relatively well.
If students don’t want or need their textbooks at the end of the semester, the bookstore buys back some textbooks at the beginning and end of semesters, and it will continue doing so with the updates.
