The commissary portion of Swanson Services Corporation began in the company’s vending operations department. At the time, all inmate accounting was done by hand and was extremely labor intensive. There was also an issue with inventory shrinkage. Inmates or officers often walked away with items without paying for them, and inventory was used in some institutions to pay inmates for work. After spending time in that part of the business, it was decided that computerization of the accounting and ordering process would increase efficiency. This had never been done before in the corrections industry, and there was pushback from employees who believed their jobs were in jeopardy if the new system was installed.
“I determined that an application needed to be written from the ground up. The program I designed and wrote was for use in the correctional facility and encompassed a banking system to track the inmates’ funds, an ordering system that allowed inmates to order, and a reporting module.
Charles Swanson, Senior Information Technology Executive
Additionally, I developed a warehouse program to manage the company’s side of the operation and included an order processing, billing, and inventory ordering and management system,” says Swanson.
Computerizing commissary operations was a groundbreaking accomplishment that revolutionized the corrections industry. Over the next 25 years, the company and its software saved the corrections industry clients and the taxpayers over a billion dollars. The savings were derived by the facility’s ability to re-allocate staff from the commissary operation to other functions within the facility, and by generating revenue that the facility was paid in the form of commissions.
The developed system eventually had competitors in the industry, but the introduction of add-on technology to the base package enabled the company to out-compete multibillion-dollar companies. A key aspect of the hardware, software, and support was that it was designed to be one system that could be modified for different clients, yet at the same time the software and data structure remained the same no matter how large or complex a client was. This generalization and flexibility in the system allowed the support staff to be much smaller than all the competitors, which gave the company a leg up in its cost structure.
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