Retail Systems' Baird says retailers have historically thrown hardware at the problem—they've looked at increasing processor speeds when they've seen point of sale and credit card transactions slowing down. That's a waste of time and money when the problem doesn't have anything to do with the point of sale system but everything to do with the credit card provider.

The Opening Act

Fort deployed Inetco's Insight product in April to monitor credit card transactions and to make sure customers weren't being held up by slow ones. He says the implementation was fairly straightforward. Installing the software on a server took a few hours.

Next, Fort and his staff spent another couple of hours verifying that transaction data was flowing into the Inetco Insight software as the transaction data was moving from the point of sale servers to the credit card processor.

They also had to create standard data records for each transaction. These data records indicate the path the transaction is travelling—for instance, whether they're inbound or outbound, the IP addresses where they're going and coming from, and the return code from the credit card authorizer. Fort and his IT staff worked with Inetco to create these records based on templates Inetco had created for standard credit card processing transactions. The templates essentially tell the software what to do, what exceptions to look for and when to send an alert. They interpret every transaction and break down each transaction into the appropriate data field on the record. The Insight software identifies failed authorizations based on the return codes.

Within days of deploying the software, Inetco Insight began identifying slow transactions.

"As we were first running this, we noticed a serious, continual blip of transactions running close to three seconds," says Fort. Most credit card transactions take anywhere from four-tenths of a second to one-and-a-half seconds to process, he says, adding that the optimum time is between one half and one second.

The software pinpointed that these long processing times were coming from one particular cash register—information they never would have had before deploying Insight. Knowing a single cash register was the source of these slow transactions, Fort's team began trouble-shooting. They made sure the point-of-sale system software was loaded properly on the machine. They double checked communication lines. Though they haven't yet determined why certain transactions on this particular cash register take as long as three seconds, they continue to monitor the situation, which fortunately, Fort says, is not a problem at the moment.

Since discovering this first anomaly, Fort and his team have set up another alert within the Insight software so that if transactions on any register exceed 1.5 seconds, the network administrator gets an e-mail notification and the alert shows up on the Inetco Insight dashboard on the network admin's computer.

Fort says he's also going to use the Insight software to do a trend analysis by credit card type and by store. "We want to make sure we're not having performance problems with any one vendor," he says. "We also want to understand if one store has better performance than another and why that is."