6 Easy Steps for a Smoother CD/DVD Order
February 21, 2008
It’s all about turn times in the eMedia industry! The speed with which your vendor can get your CD or DVD project completed is vital to many customers. However, responsibility for these projects meeting their completion dates starts with the customer and ends with the vendor. It’s a partnership that shares the responsibility. Just follow the 6 easy steps below:
1) Complete Credit Reference
- When submitting a credit application, be sure to fill out all sections. - Contact your references and advise them to complete the required form that will be faxed to them by your CD/DVD vendor. Also, remind them to return the paperwork to your vendor as soon as possible.
2) Communicate All Details of the Project to Your Sales or Customer Service Representative
- Provide all shipping details to your sales or customer service representatives (changes in shipping information must be communicated as soon as possible).
- Provide the information that you would like on the mirror band of CD-ROMs and DVD-ROMs.
3) Protect Yourself
- Fill out, sign and return the Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) form to make sure content ownership is properly handled. A completed and signed IPR form usually must be provided with every order prior to your job being scheduled for production.
Top Questions to Ask Before Buying a Help Desk & Asset Management Software
February 20, 2008
#5 All your hardware components like Printers, PCs etc come under various maintenance contracts with different maintenance vendors. Do you know which batch of PCs are under warranty & for what number of PCs is the warranty about to expire (so that you can plan for an AMC)? Can you split up & tell how much AMC charges do you pay for each hardware component & how much for each vendor? Can you re-calculate the costs if an AMC with a vendor is to be renewed?
#4 Typically your company gets hardware parts and accessories from different vendors. Is your purchasing done centrally? Can you get the information of all vendors & the products they offer on a single click? Can you compare prices & other information before placing an order? Can you modify a purchase order (PO), have a revision history & email the vendor the updated PO? Can you track POs till all the items mentioned in a PO arrive?
#3 You might have entered into contracts with various vendors. Do you maintain & keep track of all your maintenance & support contracts in one place? How about having soft copies of actual contracts that are available to you through a web browser and is always a single click away?
Bill of Lading ? Custom Reporting for Microsoft Great Plains ? Overview for Consultant
February 19, 2008
Bill of Lading is required report for Logistics and Freight Forwarding companies. If you are looking at Freight Forwarding software, targeted to automate transportation business ? Bill of Lading with multiple custom forms should be present there. However if you need the extension to standard ERP/Accounting application ? you may be looking at the option to customize the system. Microsoft Business Solutions Great Plains might be considered as ERP platform, ready for customization. Let us give you customization highlights.
? Sales Order Processing ? SOP is the module, where you create customer order, transfer it into invoice upon the completion, fulfillment or allocation. So, naturally Bill of Lading should be originated in SOP. Also nice feature in SOP is multicurrency (Dollar, Euro, Yen, Yuan, Peso) support, so Bill of Lading report could be produced for international shipment
? MBL/HBL ? House Bill of Lading may include several Master Bill of Ladings, associated with the shipment to specific customer. Microsoft Great Plains naturally associate invoice with single customer, this is why House Bill of Lading should be light Great Plains Dexterity customization, where you combine several shipments into one container (HBL). Simplified solution is just to use user defined fields for HBL & MBL.
Manufacturing Outsourcing: Microsoft Great Plains Implementation, Customization & Reporting
February 19, 2008
Manufacturing in the USA is far away down from mid 20th century top of the hill or its golden time. However we are in very competitive business environment and we have to do what market tends us to do. Nowadays competitive offshore manufacturing labor cost outweighs custom clearance fees and forces us to have not full-size manufacturing, but rather final assembly facilities here in the US distribution centers, such as Chicago, Nashville, Los Angeles. We’d like to give you successful implementation/downsizing/outsourcing scenario of mid-size machinery manufacturer.
? Downsizing need. US recession of 2000-2004 decreased monthly crane trucks order from 200 per month to 50. Company laid off manufacturing and assembly workers. ERP system had full-featured manufacturing (Kewill manufacturing) and the annual maintenance fee to Kewill was about k$50 plus company had more employees in accounting department to enter manufacturing related data than it had manufacturing workers Kewill was serving just manufacturing automation, Great Plains Dynamics on Pervasive SQL 2000 was in place of General Ledger (GL), Sales Order Processing and Account Payables module (AP)
10 Programming Tips
February 18, 2008
(1) Avoid using the same variable again and again for different purposes.
This happens with us that we think that more and more memory will be wasted if we declare seperate variable for each purpose. But, if any debugging is about to be done and program is quite a typical. Then, debugger will get confused and Dry-Run will also not work in such a scenario. So, if your program is small then, you can use the same variable. But, if it is complex, then do not use the same cheap practive.
(2) Use capital letter to variable name for global variables.
You should use capital letters because, there should be distinguishable difference between a local variable and global variable. There should not be any confusion while dry run or debugging.
(3) All the variables should be declared at one place.
This helps the programmer to analyze whether some variable is yet declared or not. If we declare them at different locations, then, a proper manner can not be acheived in your programming. The variables should normally defined just below the function declaration.
(4) There should be proper indenting in whole program.
Great Plains Bill of Materials Setup & Customization for Process Manufacturing ? Overview
February 17, 2008
Microsoft Great Plains has full-featured Manufacturing suite of modules: Capacity Requirements Planning, Job Costing, Master Production Scheduling, Materials Requirements Planning, etc. However Microsoft Great Manufacturing serves so-called discrete manufacturing market niche. At the same time Great Plains fits to mid-size companies, where manufacturing processes might be categorized as light assembly. One of our clients, mid-size crane trucks manufacturing facility recently outsourced all the parts assembly to overseas partners and concentrated on sales, distribution, leasing and only light final assembly. This small article describes you how you could deploy Microsoft Great Plains Bill or Materials in process manufacturing. We will describe combination of Sales Order Processing (SOP) module to get customer orders, Bill of Materials (BOM) to assembly for the order, Inventory Control (IV) to allocate materials and Purchase Order Processing (POP) to replenish inventory
? Order Taking. In SOP you create Sales Order and you use standard functionality ? place order in the batch and then upon the completion you transfer order to Invoice to bill the customer. If you participate in international business, you should take advantage from Multicurrency (MC) feature, expanded on SOP (Euro, Yen, Yuan, Peso, Real, etc.).
Defining OLAP Solutions and Data Warehouse design
February 16, 2008
This tutorial covers OLAP solutions used by Data warehouses and understanding Data Warehouse design. The enterprise needs to ask itself certain fundamental questions before actually launching on the process of designing the data warehouse. It must begin with a conviction that a data warehouse would really help its business and the return on investment will make it worth it.
Defining OLAP Solutions
The data warehouse offloads data from a multitude of sources. The cleaned, validated and loaded data is voluminous and daunting. This data needs to be organized, categorized and arranged in meaningful order for analytical purposes. OLAP solutions are specifically designed to cater to this need.
OLAP solutions used by Data warehouses are:
Multidimensional views of data. Data in the data warehouse is organized into subject oriented categories and tables. Fact tables are constructed and linked to various dimensional tables in star or snowflake schemas or combinations of them to form multidimensional views of data. Cubes are built using these multidimensional schemas. Rapid browsing and querying then becomes possible. These views are independent of the way in which data is stored in the data warehouse.
Enterprise Resource Planning Overview
February 15, 2008
ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) Overview covers What is ERP, Brief history of ERP, Why is it necessary, Market Leaders and the future of ERP.
What is ERP?
Enterprise Resource Planning or ERP is an industry term for integrated, multi-module application software packages that are designed to serve and support multiple business functions. An ERP system can include software for manufacturing, order entry, accounts receivable and payable, general ledger, purchasing, warehousing, transportation and human resources. Evolving out of the manufacturing industry, ERP implies the use of packaged software rather than proprietary software written by or for one customer. ERP modules may be able to interface with an organization’s own software with varying degrees of effort, and, depending on the software, ERP modules may be alterable via the vendor’s proprietary tools as well as proprietary or standard programming languages.
Brief History of ERP
The focus of manufacturing systems in the 1960’s was on Inventory control. Most of the software packages then (usually customized) were designed to handle inventory based on traditional inventory concepts. In the 1970’s the focus shifted to MRP (Material Requirement Planning) systems that translated the Master Schedule built for the end items into time-phased net requirements for the sub-assemblies, components and raw materials planning and procurement.
MicroWorld Releases New Version of MailScan Ver. 4.5 - Antivirus and Content Security Software
February 14, 2008
MicroWorld Technologies, Inc. the leading solutions provider in the area of Anti-virus and Content security, has announced the launch of its new version of MailScan Ver. 4.5, the antivirus and content security software for mail servers.
The new version of MailScan provides additional security features to allow users to monitor the TCP connections on their systems, and use enhanced Anti-SPAM control to fight SPAM.
The new security feature interface displays all the active TCP connections to your computer. It lists information about the processes, protocols, local addresses, remote addresses and Process Status on the computer. It allows you to identify any unauthorized access to your mail server and take effective counter measures to safeguard your system.
MailScan 4.5 provides the user with real time access to Relay Blackhole List at for IPs of known Spammers. The site maintains active real-time Blackhole list that you can use to verify if any IP that connects to your MailServer is listed as that of a known Spammer, and take appropriate action.
MailScan 4.5 is the next step in the continuing process to provide added security to mail servers against virus attacks, SPAM and other forms of security threats to networks via e-mail.
Microsoft Great Plains in Metal Distribution: Implementation & Customization ? Consultant Overview
February 14, 2008
Microsoft Business Solutions Great Plains serves to the wide spectrum of horizontal markets and could be also considered as generic ERP/MRP/Accounting platform for light and advanced customization to fit verticals. In this small article we describe distribution sector with the example from metal distribution - Dealer/broker of industrial nonferrous by-product scrap, de-tins and de-oils industrial by-product scrap and finished parts. It might sound a bit complex ? but we think this is typical for this horizontal market niche. The language of the article is targeted to primarily technical consultant and in-house programmer/software developer. In our opinion ? ERP applications should be implemented with the leveraged help and support of internal IT people ? we are entering into the epoch of technical specialists and IT departments ? smile.
Industry specifics:
? Cost / Price with 5 decimals of the dollar. Well ? if you sell thousands of pounds with the price per pound ? then every tiny fraction of the cent makes a difference in vendor selection. In Microsoft Great Plains you have reserved 5 digits in the currency datatype to be able to track 5 decimals of the $. In case of Euro or other currency in multi currency environment ? this should be applicable to your local currency: Rand, Peso, Real, Pound, Yen, Chinese Yuan.
