Polling (or comms) is the process of transferring data between Retail Pro systems.  This is a two way process which can be scheduled to take place anywhere between “as fast as the computer can process the data” and never.  Most users tend to use a daily polling cycle as they do not have anyone dedicated to looking at sales on a more regular basis – hence the polling cycle is usually determined by the review period required.

A full polling cycle involves the following:

1. Process out: Identifying any documents that have been changed or newly created since the last process out and converting these into transaction type bundles called “mailbags” – each mailbag contains documents of a specific type such as sales, adjustments, transfers etc.
2. Exchange: Transferring the mailbags from one location to t another (store to head office and head office to store).
3. Process In: Opening the mailbags and importing their contents into Retail Pro.

A full polling cycle requires the above to run twice in order to get updated information from the stores to the head office server and back.

For polling to take place, several ducks need to be put in a row.  These are:

1. The computers that will be polling need to be switched on at the time the polling process is due to take place.  This may seem like an obvious statement, but it is not uncommon for new PCs to be set up without having their power saving features disabled.  As these power saving features tend to kick in after so many hours of inactivity, it is often the case that while staff leave PCs running when they close a store at 5:30pm, by the time polling takes place at 1:00am, the PC has already gone to sleep.  It is therefore critical to ensure that all power saving features, on the PC in general, and also specifically the network card, are switched off.
2. The Retail Pro Scheduler must be loaded and have the correct profile configured.  The scheduler is what runs processes at a predetermined time.  If this is not running, there is nothing to tell Retail Pro to initiate polling at any time.  Also, if the Scheduler is loaded, but the profile on which the polling schedule is based is not loaded or configured, the Scheduler will happily run on its own and essentially do nothing as it hasn’t been told what to do.  For the Retail Pro 8 Scheduler, the user must be logged into Windows as the process of logging out of Windows shuts down the Scheduler and any other running application.
3. There must be a physical link between the computers polling.  Basically, your internet connection and VPN has to be operational.  This includes making sure that any firewalls existing between the computers have been allowed to let the polling traffic pass through them.  This “link” is made up of several components – the PC needs to have a connection to a network switch or router, the router has to have a connection to the internet, the ISPs network must be operating, and the VPN between the two computers communicating must be up.  Again, this may sound obvious but issues can arise when, for example, at the beginning of a billing cycle an ISP will reset the connection to start accounting for traffic again.  Some routers are smart enough to re-establish a connection when this happens, some are not.
4. If you are using Retail Pro 8, everyone must be out of the system at all locations in order for polling to take place.  Retail Pro 8 does allow for polling certain data while the system is in use (e.g. sales transactions going back to Head Office), but it will not allow a full inventory update as this requires overwriting files that Retail Pro 8 keeps open while the system is running.  When Retail Pro is left running one, or several things can happen which will lead to partial polling taking place.  For example, if Retail Pro is running when the process out is taking place, the store will not send a full set of data to the head office server.  If it is running during a process in operation, then the store will not be able to import the data it has received from head office.

We often get requests to “check polling”.  This is usually identified by Head Office staff running reports that do not display a full set of data (e.g. a sales report shows no sales information for a particular store for a given day), or by store staff when tey try to sell a product which Retail Pro says doesn’t exist in their local system but exists at Head Office.

Our procedure to “check polling” is simply to go back to the basics above.  We ensure all ducks are in a row, and in cases where they are not we align them – i.e. we check 1 – 4 above and ensure all is OK, then we manually poll.

One thing to keep in mind is that polling checks need to be part of the daily maintenance of any multi-site Retail Pro system – or any system that relies on the transfer of data from one location to another.  The reason for this is that there are many factors that can affect polling, most of which run outside of the scope of Retail Pro and its internal operation – while these external factors affect Retail Pro, Retail Pro has no way of knowing what has gone wrong and what it can do to address the problem.  Retail Pro does has built-in safeguards to address things like corrupt mailbags, receipt of partial mailbags, handling of mailbags when Retail Pro is left running etc.

If you would like to go through in more detail on what can be done to minimise polling issues and the diagnostics available in Retail Pro to diagnose these, please contact the Retail IQ Helpdesk.