Author Topic: OrderTrack - A sales order/shipping management solution  (Read 4176 times)

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mkaney

  • Posts: 3
OrderTrack - A sales order/shipping management solution
« on: May 29, 2018, 12:10:41 AM »
So let me just start with the basics.  The system was designed to coordinate and automate the business processes between sales and shipping.  It begins in PostgreSQL, where I have the mirrored Sage 100 data, as well as some tables that store additional information that are linked to the keys in the Sage 100 data, e.g. salesorderno.   The interface was created entirely in Microsoft Access, because Access has some very special features.  First, it is very easy to create bound forms and datagrids.  Second, it is very easy to link to a variety of database sources and use them together very easily.  In fact I hardly even use the native database features of Access at all.  Most people's impression of Access applications comes from seeing some really poorly designed GUIs, and I cannot blame them for being skeptical.  However, the potential of Access is astounding.   I created some classes in VBA to deal with the Sage 100 BOI, and that's how I update orders directly from OrderTrack

I have added a screenshot of OrderTrack to this post, though I don't appear to be able to embed an image unless it is at a url.  I will get into more of the details about how OrderTrack works in a followup to this post tomorrow.  For now here is a short list of some of the features:

- Allows sales manager to review and approve orders that have been entered into Sage 100.  Accepting an order takes the order off hold, sets its priority (a UDF field), and calculates and updates the shipping date. 
- Allocates available inventory to accepted orders.  Also allows overriding allocation and a tool for staging orders (which is manual allocation that will reserve inventory for those orders)
- Provides an interface for sales to see ALL open orders, where they are in the queue, whether they meet various criteria for shipping (e.g. some orders for international customers are not selected for shipment until the total value of the allocate inventory for ALL of their open orders exceeds a certain threshhold, to save shipping costs.  Also allows drill down so they can see what items are short.
- Includes tools that provide information on expected availability of items not allcoated
- Provides an interface for shipping to work directly from.  Allows communication between shipping and sales, preventing constant phone calls and questions that reduce productivity.
- Prints barcoded picking slips

There are ton of other features, but hopefully that short rundown gives folks a better idea of what it does.

John Spikowski

  • Posts: 34
Re: OrderTrack - A sales order/shipping management solution
« Reply #1 on: May 29, 2018, 06:55:32 PM »
Wow!

Amazing job and an excellent example of what can be done using Sage's 100 / MAS90 open API (BOI) interface and industry standard tools.