George Anderson used to be a motor mechanic with his own workshop. Being gregarious and service-orientated, he would offer his customers a drink after hours when they came to collect their vehicles. His clients enjoyed this so much that they came for a drink in the evenings whether their vehicles were being serviced or not.
So Anderson got rid of the spanners, applied for a licence and turned the place into a bar.
But the one unpalatable thing Anderson found in running a bar was the daily stock-take. With the vast range of spirits around, bar owners have to stock almost all brands of whisky and brandy and so on, otherwise customers who can't get what they want go elsewhere. A largish bar has about 300 brands of spirits and liqueurs and bar owners need to know how much of any brand is consumed daily, so as not to be caught short or plundered by unscrupulous staff. It's not good for cash flow to be overstocked, either.
So, after many tedious hours of trying to work out with a tape measure how many tots were left in the various-shaped bottles, Anderson decided to devise an easier way of doing this. The result was his patented system, BottleTot.
Simple in concept and probably unique, the system took five years of research and about R500 000 to produce. Anderson sold his bar to finance its development.
The system is a "software application that prints bottle-specific, self-adhesive labels for accurate content measurement". The labels are stuck upside a bottle of whisky, for example, numbering the tots and giving you an instant read on the number remaining.
To record the number of bottles of any brand consumed in a month, the bar owner merely records how many labels for it were printed in that month. Stock-taking is reduced from a couple of hours or so to a matter of minutes.
If an establishment has more than one bar and the owner wants to know how each bar is doing, the tot labels can be colour-coded. An A4 page produces 17 tot strips 10 mm wide. A 750 ml bottle contains 30 tots.
Anderson says the main reason it took so long to develop his system was because he had to employ several computer geeks to programme it, none of whom really succeeded. It was the last company, Umgeni Computer Consultants, who whacked it out in two weeks.
Before hiring computer programmers, he approached a company that made bottles and inquired if it would be interested in producing bottles with tot graduations and numbers on them. Though interested, the bottle maker declined because its own clients weren't taken with the idea.
There are 180 000 licensed liquor outlets in SA; Anderson hopes to be supplying them all one day.
The system, available on CD-Rom, costs R1 950. Clients have three months to request bottle labels for products not already configured in the system. Thereafter there is a nominal charge for new configurations.
Anderson has 454 brand configurations on his system.
