A Descent into the SSCS Portal

You really should explore our user-exclusive treasure trove of information, if you haven’t already.

Once in a while, here at the SSCS Blog, we circle back to key topics of interest. It allows us to point out available services and options for current customers that may have overlooked them. For non-SSCS customers, these refreshers help create a sense of market distinction the reader remembers. And if that reader happens to be a convenience store operator, perhaps they’ll be induced to look a little more closely at SSCS as a potential technology provider.

Today we’re calling your attention to the SSCS Portal. SSCS customers access it through the SSCS Corporate Website using their valid Customer ID. We wrote a comprehensive article about the Portal when we launched it nearly four years ago that includes information on logging onto the Portal and gaining access to its treasure trove of information, as well as details on how to access the information summarized below. They haven’t changed so check them out when you get the chance.

To know where you are going, you need to have a firm grasp on the past. Plus it’s often important for those inside our company and outside of it to remember when an enhancement was released. The enhancements page allows you to click on the link of your favorite SSCS product and gain a complete history of every release to date. You might even find one or two features of the CDB that you missed! How’s that for found money?

SSCS offers advanced online training on selected topics, including G/L Bridge and Central Price Book. These teacher-guided classes, which can be taken from the convenience of your desktop, were selected because they were the topics on which most people wanted instruction. On the Advanced Training page, we provide short descriptions on the content of each course with an online registration form that is easy to use. SSCS Users can access this page for a complete list of the online instruction we offer.

We’ve written often about our Videos page—we release new ones all the time so they are always part of our news feed (or so it seems)—but we thought this would be an appropriate time to emphasize the sheer scope of what we offer.

Over 80 (!) videos are now available on the video page, each one of them providing training on some aspect of SSCS Technology, mostly revolving around our flagship back office system, the Computerized Daily Book (CDB).

From the simplest procedures to complex multi-part procedures, customers who visit our video page will find the topic or topics that can sharpen their understanding of our software and how it can make the business more profitable.

Included are series on Direct Store Deliveries (DSDs), Physical Inventory Audits (INVs), ending a month, setting up a store, and perhaps most popular of all, a series called “Daily Work” which simply introduces our software. And while multipart video sequences parcel out the details of our software in convenient 30 to 60 minute helpings, we host many single videos that showcase shorter procedures within our applications—multi-item promotions, barcode printing, Item Adjustment, automated reordering, precision tax handling, and many more.

In addition, Video Notes are associated with many videos. These are quick reference documents that walk you through each process described in each video, so that you don’t have to pause the video and hit play again as you follow instructions. With conceptual overviews as well as step-by-step instructions, our videos help everyone from complete novices to industry veterans make the most of our software and applications. They are by far the most popular destination on the SSCS Portal.

Our document library is expansive and detailed. While most know they can access manuals documenting our major products and services (accessed from the Full Manuals, Short Manuals, and Poller Interface Manuals links), this page contains many less known documents of use to clients:

• Product and Program Announcements — Sometimes you don’t need detailed information on a product or service, you simply need an overview of what it does and what features and benefits it offers. That is the point of the announcements on this page, to give you a sense of the nature of something before you investigate it further.
• Report Samples — They’re more than samples, they’re sets of explanations about what these reports can do for you in terms of features and benefits. Both books bundle key sets of our over 200 reports for easy reference.
• Software Feature Announcements — These are like the product announcements in approach, only they target specific features within our software, like Critical Inventory, Foodservice, and Multi-Item Promotions.
• Other SSCS References and Documents — You’ll find a wide variety of valuable information here, diverse enough to make it difficult to summarize. There are overviews of our company, the system recommendations you need to run our software, and important self-help on how to get EDI delivery working for you. Some of our corporate customers will find material on procedures specific to their organization, as well. When you get a minute you might want to take a look at these and the rest of the selections we haven’t mentioned.

If you’re a customer, we hope that you stop by the SSCS Portal when you have the chance. You’ll undoubtedly find something useful. And if you are not an SSCS customer, we hope we gave you enough food for thought to compel you to explore us in a little more detail!