Wholesale Distribution Reporting System
Business Situation
The client firm, a wholesale distribution software-consulting firm based in LA, California, provided comprehensive business solutions to its customers using on an ERP solution (based on Progress 9.1D database). Their supplied reporting application for sale/purchase, accounting, and inventory was too restricted and required a makeover to allow for quicker and easier inquiries to the financial data for multiple companies in a group, with better visual & text reporting features.
The Mindfire Solution
Mindfire took up the opportunity to design and build a robust, modular, scalable, and configurable software, a desktop application, to meet the end-user needs. Mindfire worked closely with the client consultant to come up with a high-performance reporting solution, managing huge data, providing excellent visual aids, and allowing user customization to visual representations. With the final solution delivered to the utmost satisfaction of the client, we are now looking at a possible Internet-based .NET application in near future.
The Mindfire Solution Details
The existing Progress-based application restricted data view for a single company and an individual account. An inquiry feature was required to access the sales, financials, accounting, cash and other relevant details for multiple companies and all the cash accounts based on Daily, Weekly, Quarterly, Month-to-Date, Year-to-Date, One Year Ago Today, This Week Last Year, MTD Last Year, QTD Last Year, and YTD Last Year statuses. We developed a .NET desktop application with new inquiry screens, showing data for all cash accounts, sales, purchases, and inventory values along with the accounting screen. The application allowed viewing and managing of up to 9 years of data, with each module offering views of both previous and current year data, facilitating comparative analysis. It provides well-defined visual aids like bar charts and gauge graphs, simpler data structuring, data export to Excel, scheduled reports. In addition, it includes the following features:
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Customizable Toolbar – to choose from the available multiple screens
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Windowed Data Browsers – to choose and save the appropriate position and size
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Configurable Gauge Graphs – to change the gauge graph calibrations to meet his/her needs
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Preferences/User Settings – to save criteria-screen selections, graph settings, decimal places
Achievements
Displaying huge datasets in real-time from a Progress database was a challenge and we achieved it with a little trade-off. We first collected data from Progress to a SQL-server database, and then easily modified & displayed details on Dashboard system in close to real-time response time, keeping the offset within an acceptable range. The client firm is very much satisfied with the Dashboard system is continuing enhancements with us.
Technologies
Progress 9.1D, .NET C# 2005, SQL Server, Progress Proxy Generator Tool, ZED Graph open source third-party software for 2D Graphs/Charts and Gauges, Component One and Infragistics Suite for 3D graphs/charts.
