April 22, 2005

Client Upgrade this Weekend

This weekend I’m doing a Microsoft Great Plains client upgrade. I’m upgrading them from version 7.0 on Pervasive to 8.0 on SQL Server.

I have a Remote Desktop connection to their server, so I can easily do this all from home. Much of the work is to just start something running, then check in periodically, and see if it’s done. Then repeat this process until the project is complete.

Posted by Ted at 08:02 PM

March 06, 2005

Setting Sales Order Processing Batch Numbers

A client recently migrated his data from the old GPA (DOS) to Great Plains on SQL server. He has the Sales Order Processing (SOP) module for entering customer orders.

The way they work is, each day they enter customer orders and invoices. The next morning, a girl downstairs reviews those orders and invoices and then posts them.

In the old DOS version, the guys doing the order entry had to stay out of the system until the girl downstairs had completed her work.

I felt their best bet would be to have a separate batch for each day of the week. That way they could still work upstairs, while the girl downstairs did her work. So, I created six SOP batches (MONDAY, TUESDAY, WEDNESDAY, THURSDAY, FRIDAY, and SATURDAY). They are open half the day on Saturday.

After a couple of days, it became apparent the guys entering orders would not always pick the correct batch to put the order in. Normally, once you start entering invoices into a batch, the batch number doesn’t change. But if you pull up a SOP document from another batch, then the default batch number is changed to the batch number on the document you just viewed.

To resolve this situation I created a SQL script that runs every night about 8:00 pm. It goes through all the SOP documents and looks at the date on the document. If figures out what day of the week this is and then, if the document is not in the correct batch, it puts into the right batch.

Now when the girl downstairs reviews all the invoices from the prior day, she can be sure she’s getting all of them.

This is one of the things I like about SQL. I can create scripts that run as frequently as I need and they can clean up a lot of the data – and they are completely transparent to the user.

Posted by Ted at 03:14 PM