A School of Continuous Improvement research poster documents a high-street settlement engine that clears pooled loyalty points across fourteen independent shops, and the traders' co-op that now funds its running costs from the engine's own unexplained nightly surplus.
A fourteen-shop settlement engine's tie-breaking rule leaves a small surplus every night, and the traders' co-op now funds its overheads from the gap rather than closing it
A ledger built to net to zero every night has never once done it exactly. A new research poster from the School of Continuous Improvement documents the settlement engine a high street’s traders’ co-op built to clear loyalty points earned at any of its fourteen member shops for redemption at any other, and the standing surplus the engine has produced, unbroken, since it went live.
Dr Dagny Okafor, Lecturer and Convenor of Evaluation of Evaluation, worked with Dr Osei Vandermeer and Dr Renke Sabel to reconstruct sixty-one weeks of the engine’s nightly clearing runs against each shop’s own point-of-sale export. The ledger closed above zero in fifty-eight of the sixty-one weeks examined, averaging nine dollars and forty cents a night regardless of trading volume or how many shops were open.
A settlement engine is supposed to disappear into the background the moment it balances. Ours has stayed remarkably visible.
— Dr Dagny Okafor, Lecturer and Convenor, Evaluation of Evaluation, School of Continuous Improvement
“The nightly figure has been remarkably consistent,” said Dr Osei Vandermeer, Research Fellow and Convenor of the Review Cadence Observatory. “Consistency was the brief. The committee is simply choosing to read it differently than we did.”
That committee has treated the finding as settled rather than open. Rather than commission a fix to the tie-breaking rule the surplus traces back to, the co-op now draws its quarterly running-cost levy directly from the same nightly figure, an arrangement its own minutes describe as evidence of the scheme’s operational maturity rather than an outstanding defect. No review of the underlying rule is scheduled.
The full poster is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.222nk6.