Supervisor

At work I started a recent project to convert our online catalog. The orignal which just a bunch of regular pages that displayed the information but did little beyond that. There was an online form that allowed customer to enter their informaton then cut and past the product information of what they wanted. Otherwise if a customer wanted to order something they had to call and we have standard business hours.

All this is limiting for an internet business so from the second I started working at TRIO I had intentions of changing the entire catalog. The bosses were resistant to the idea wanting to keep the personal touch of a person. As months went by I managed to convince them that a database driven online catalog would be better and we could always keep the number for that personal touch if the customer wanted.

For the past two months I have been experiementing with online catalogs and I like the php/sql variants and went with one called oscommerce which is open source and seems popular. I set up the shopping cart, actually went live with it for a few weeks testing it on jewelry displays and am now ready to convert the entire catalog over.

The problem is we have 1000s of items. If I were to try and enter all the items it would take me forever plus I have other things to do. I knew I was going to have to hire some help. I talked with the bosses and they agreed but there was the problem of space and computers in the office. We didn't want to buy more computers just for a few months of data entry.

If then occured to me that you could access the shopping cart from anywhere and I decided to hire people who could work at home. After a few meeting with the boss I managed to convince them to allow me to do this. I set up a system of how to keep track of everything and just finished hiring four data entry people in which I am in charge of.

This has been very exciting for me as I have never been in charge of anyone. If anything I have had people on the same level that I have had seniority over. I had to advertise on craigslist, type up instruction and go over the process with each one. They turn to me when there is a problem and I have had to set specific requirements and keep track of all the data.

It has been fun and educational and the data entry project should last for 1-2 months and then the new catalog will go live. I can't wait, I can't remember the last time I was this excited about my job.