product

Back Office Inventory Features for Version 7

The velocity of new features being shipped in NeXT has really accelerated during the past 3 months.  Most of the work has been centered on our Food and Beverage modules, but plenty of features for Retail have shipped as well. Version 7.26.47 was released on Sunday, November 6, 2011. The full scope of Version 7 of DataWorks' NeXT Back Office Inventory system  is massive, but here is the short list of enhancements and features that I wanted to highlight. Product Form:

  • New Wrapper to separately maintain Retail, Food and Supplies Products.
  • New Menu to Review Archived Products
  • New Lock / Unlock of  Cost and Retail Controls
  • Standardization of Product Attributes to enable control for Retail, Food, Supplies or Global access.
  •  Taxable Purchases setup for Supplies
  • Catch Weight definition for Food
  • Sysco 832 EDI order guide import
  • Vendor Product EDI Linking / Unlinking capacity
  • Vendor Product to Manufacturer product creation.

Purchase Orders:

  • Reusable Templates for Shopping List and Common Reorders grouped by employee access
  • The Ship To Facility was freed from Employee Access rights.
  • Added Search for Outlets allocated on a purchase order(s)
  • Suppress need for Retail Input for Food and Supply vendors
  • Ability to define Catch Weights for One-Step PO's
  • New Internal and External Documents that specify Order, Pack and Weight units
  • Search Option for Input Method (i.e. Manual, Suggested, Requisition, or EDI Import)
  • Email PO to Vendor option

Receiving

  • Catch Weight Input
  • Automatic and Manual Tax Calculation
  • Addition Landed Cost Calculation
  • Suppress Need of Retail Input for Food and Supply Vendors
  • Posting to Accounts payable distribution enhanced to smoothly round to two decimals

Physical Inventory

  • Initialization of Physical Counts HUGE speed increase. Example: 30 minutes now 5 minutes.

Markdowns

  • Enhanced Selection Ability
  • Added Previewer with multiple selector
  • Added Hand held interface for uploads

Requisitions and Fulfillment

  • Default "Work For" Facility by Employee
  • Reusable Templates by Employee Access Group
  • Support for Hand Held Uploads
  • Sort Options for details
  • Debugged Store Specific Requisition Option when From Facility is a Warehouse
  •  Date Needed Always Calculated - not just for Events
  • Allow Fulfillment options to be re-evaluated by Warehouse staff's Employee Access rights
  • Start Fulfillment form with a Find form
  • Loosen  Requisition rules to allow more liberal submitting
  • Changed Transfer Specific Option for Transfer From Facility to be free from Employee Access

Reports

  • Warehouse Location Reports (D013 and D014)
  • Consolidation Report C001,002, and 003 dynamically display number of decimals for fractional food and supplies
  • Detail Sales reports DCOG01-09 compare base, landed and theoretical cost of goods.
  • Barcode label printing  for Warehouse locations
Interfaces
  • Base, Net, Landed, Center of Plate and Theoretical Cost of Goods now saved for historical reporting.
  • MICROS Symophony POS  support
  • Added Zip file options for packaging multiple export files into a fix or unique file name
  • RX30 POS support
  • Book4Time POS Support
  • Version 3.0 of AP and GL exports support single flatten csv file format.
  • Version 3.1 of AP export supports all optional PO User Defined Attributes
General
  • Input for Product No and Description are now "Contains " rather than "Begins With"
  • Verify Barcode export to hand helds for Receiving and  Transfer Ins
  • Sped up access routines associated with adding a new facility

Inventory Control Response Times - DataWorks 3 / 6 Design Axiom

Way back in 2006 we did a major re-factoring of our inventory control application - NeXT®.  We took out stop watches and started charting all of our form's behaviors. We  focused on our Daily Maintenance and Transactional forms (read about those here).

DataWorks' 3/6 Design Axiom:

  • Any user action (click of a button, etc) that takes over 3 seconds to complete must be accompanied with a thermometer, hour glass or status message that indicates the system is still working.
  • The goal of all forms is that they display usable information to the end user within 3 seconds of a menu click.
  • The maximum allowed time that a form can take to display is 6 seconds.
  • A form that takes over 6 seconds to display, must be redesigned with less data or fewer controls until it takes 6 or less seconds to load.

It was while penning our newest amendment to our  design constitution - "The 10 Second Rule" that I remembered we had established this rule of 3's and 6's as an internal SOP within our R&D group. This axiom was adopted during the re-tooling of version 3 of NeXT. I think any application designer can use these as benchmarks to judge the  usability of their software.  Obviously, it would be better if everything was instantaneous - but in 2010 we sit upon a  hardware plateau that is unlikely to see any dynamic swing in productivity.

The outcome of our axiom was that slow, data-fat forms where refitted with hyperlinks to allow  loading and displaying of data on request rather than loading and displaying everything immediately. It made us think about the relevance of information. What was primary? What was secondary? I think it resulted in a cleaner look that allows for more intuitive data input and data mining.

The best example of this visual and data weight lost is NeXT''s general product form. Here are the  before and after photos.  The biggest difference is that the before image has 6 child views strung along the bottom of the form. By reducing it down to one grid with just SKU information we lost 10 seconds on the load of the form.

The speed up was not just from the data connection and query. It was also the reduction of the additional interface controls. Each control (page, grid, command button) has it's own load, initialization, and refresh events that eat up CPU cycles faster than my children eat Cinnamon Toast Crunch cereal. Every child page and grid we turned into a hyperlink shaved another half second from the form's fat load time.

The data is still available, but we added hyperlinks to get to that data. Green links lead you to  add, edit and delete record land. Blue links indicate there is read-only information ahead.