A lottery sales representative, Otto the Beer Guy, explained his view of the business to me. Since some Scratch tickets sell better than others, and it’s a good idea to make the most popular ones easiest to find. To help Otto, I developed a metric that compares games on their current popularity, making it easier for people to see which games may need more space. The metric is based on the retail standard of turn rate. NASPL Insights June 2017
Tag: inventory control
Automating the Lottery Instant Game Supply Chain
In NASPL Insights January 2012, I report on the Business Rule Test (BuRT) project. A six-month project at WA Lottery showed that a fully automated system supported retailers as well or better than the inside sales/telephone sales that was standard at the time of the test. One key to the success of this project was to provide the sales representatives a way to provide information to the system based on their local knowledge. Another key was to harvest higher-level data from the gaming system to understand which games were trending in the marketplace. I posited a set of business rules, implemented them as code on a generic computing platform (VBA/ Excel!), and compared consumption of instant tickets from retailers who participated in the test, to a control group. The test retailers saw a sales increase.