Projects

Mindfire has deep experience developing business and enterprise applications for the distribution and supply-chain industries. We describe some of these distribution and supply-chain industry project experiences below, and will be glad to share our expertise in detail with you.

• B2B - FileMaker plugin
• Catch Weight

Industry:
Furnishing
Technologies:
C++, wxWidgets, FileMaker SDK, FileMaker scripting, HomeDepot SDK, EDI

This FileMaker plug-in provides Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) facilities to the dealer/reseller software system extensively used in the carpet/furnishing industry. It provides facility for connecting to the FTP sites of various vendors that the dealer trades with, downloading and uploading electronic documents in the form of ANSI X12 transaction sets. The electronic documents are processed for translation to and from the Dealers software system. The software processes the following business documents between dealers and HomeDepot using HomeDepot SDK for EDI:

- Price/Product Catalog (ANSI 832)
- Purchase order (ANSI 850)
- PO Acknowledgment (ANSI 855)
- Invoice (ANSI 810)
- Acknowledgements (ANSI 997)

Industry:
Distributions and Supply Chain Management
Technologies:
Progress 10.0B, Progress Database

Client's Distribution system is a complete solution for all distribution needs from Inventory Purchases to Sales to Accounting. It has been designed to fulfill almost every industry, but it did not have some features to support all the needs of the food industry, where the frequency of one complete cycle is not a month or quarter or year instead it's a WEEK or even less and where the items are stored in Lots Quantity/ Container and are sold by pieces or weight.

Meaning whatever comes into the inventory comes in huge quantities, but at the time of selling it is not being sold as a whole lot.

For example: a Fish supplier receives a 10 Lots of prawns weighing 100 pounds each, that is total of 1000 pounds, into his inventory.

Suppose a customer requires 25.5 pounds of prawns, the sales representative goes to the inventory and takes out a Lot of 1 (100 pounds) and start picking prawns from it. He then weighs it as per requirement but  comes to the conclusion that he can sell either 25 pounds or 30 pounds to customer but cannot sell 25.5 pounds.

That is where we needed to modify and add a complete module to the system which hooks up the logic with standard logic of taking inventory by lot and also saving the weight of each individual piece in that lot in the system.

By doing so we are always in sync of what has come into inventory and what is going out of it. That is called 'Catch Weight' of the lot product(s).

We have designed the 'Catch Weight' system by modifying / adding more tables to the database and changing the standard business logic by adding hooks to it and changing the standard code with due permission, wherever necessary.

This is applicable to any distribution industry in which the Inventory Purchases are being made in terms of Lots / Quantity and Sales are made according to the Weight of the item, for example Food Industry.

All this has been achieved with the extensive usage of HOOK's created in Progress 10.0B.