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| Warehouse
System -
Case Study |
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This bespoke
application was written for a London based company
who hold and distribute stocks of printed materials
and promotional items on behalf of blue chip clients.
They have a number of warehouses where goods are
delivered, stored, collated and dispatched. There
is a web front end for their customers to check
stock levels and request items. All items are photographed
with a digital camera as they are delivered which
helps identification and gives an image for the
web site.
Warehouse staff use wireless barcode scanners to
move and track items in the warehouses which automatically
download their data into the database whenever they
are placed in their docking cradles. The system
will print barcode stock labels and bar-coded job
sheets for packing staff who simply scan a barcode
when each stage of a job is complete. This allows
office staff and customers to monitor the state
of a packing job without the need for PCs and the
overhead of data entry in the warehouse.
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Another nice
feature of the system is the ability of users to
customise the web front end to match the corporate
colours and logos of the client and hence provide
a more transparent service. The web pages look up
their settings from the database depending on who
logs on. So for example someone from British Airways
logging in to send a box of corporate brochures
to their New York office would see the site in red
white and blue with BA logos. Someone from Virgin
Atlantic while seeing essentially the same layout
of information would see the site in red and yellow
with Virgin logos.
The software includes a simple to uses tool built
into the contact management section of the software
for office staff to set this up for each new customer
selecting colours from a pallet and adding logos
from files.
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Stock items can be held in multiple locations located by warehouse, sector, aisle, bay and pallet. Every single location has an associated charging rate to automatically calculate storage charges and invoice customers.
Total stock figures are broken down into on order, in stock and allocated stock with each item clearly showing each of these together with all locations where it is held.
Low stock alerts are handled by a daily report for regular items and automated emails to the relevant manager for critical items.
The Contact Management module integrates with Outlook for emails and Zetafax for desktop faxing and all communications are logged. Each company can have multiple contacts and each contact can have multiple phone numbers, fax numbers, email addresses, mobile numbers etc.
There is document management included for scanning delivery notes and other paperwork relating to stock items.
A comprehensive set of reports is included and training was given in Seagate Crystal Reports for the client to have the skills to create their own in future.
The system has proved very successful, improving
stock traceability, job tracking and the web
front end has been used as an effective marketing
tool helping to win major new contracts. |
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The software is written in Visual
Basic with a Microsoft SQL Server database and ASP based
web pages.
A link to their Sage accounting software is provided
by an end of day CSV export. |
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