Government of Ontario finds Vigilant Retail POS for over-the-counter sales, and its Sales Orders & Invoicing for phone order taking and web store sales

One of the Ministries within the Government of Ontario distributes six varieties of provincial maps ranging in scale from 1:10,000 to 1:1.5 million; nearly 40 different forestry, fish and wildlife regulations and related publications; educational videos and posters; as well as provincial parks merchandise comprising of T-shirts, caps, flashlights, water bottles, and other park related items. It also sells copies of aerial photographs covering the entire province as well as digitally drawn custom maps the Ministry makes from these photos. Currently, such Ministry sales are steadily approaching $500,000 a year.

The Ministry discovered Vigilant five years ago, when it became serious about marketing and managing information products. The Information Access Administrator for Client Services had been given the mandate to provide improved public access to the products. He immediately responded by establishing a dealer network to sell the Ministry's information products. Today, they number 130 outlets province-wide, but even then, they were in need of an accounting system to manage their expanding sales network.

"The Vigilant software maintains a threshold of our inventory," the Information Access Administrator for Client Services explains. "When we are getting low on a product, Vigilant will warn us and tell us that it is time to restock it. It's also a point-of-sale system, so that when we sell product at the desk, the product is already in there with an inventory number, a sale price and its tax rates. So, in effect, Vigilant is our front line cash register. At the end of the day, it also produces a sales summary. The person on cash can balance money versus product that went out."

With their e-commerce site up and running the customer will be able to place orders directly on the Internet. "Once the buyer's credit card has been authorized, Vigilant picks up the order that the customer has placed and put it in its database. From there, the warehouse will fill the order and transfer that information back into Vigilant. In turn, Vigilant will send information to headquarters," he relates. "So we know our inventory levels and what our sales are in real time. Vigilant is the backbone, too, of our electronic commerce."

In the process, Vigilant is aiding the Ministry in going worldwide with sales and distribution. "It allow us to manage the demand for information from so many more people-not just across the country, but also in the United States and abroad."

The demand from foreign sources is likely to be brisk. Tourism surveys confirm that thousands of people fond of the outdoors dream to hunt, fish, hike, or paddle in Ontario's vast stretches of unspoiled wilderness and parklands.