Before spending precious budget dollars on new technologies, consider leveraging technology already owned. 

Making system and pricing changes for over 50 stores in 4 states was required to maintain our competitive edge. 

The problem was that the communications network we were using was less than 100% reliable.  To get to 100% confidence on the most critical changes required many IT hands physically changing each store.  A single change could require as much as 30 person hours to complete.

The solution was called Auto-Cron.  A scripting system using existing technology, enabled a single IT team member to perform and validate system updates across all corporate and franchise stores in two hours.