Customer Story:
This
customer is in the printing business.
Large printing presses run 24 hours a day, producing many of the weekly
city newspapers in the SF bay area.
They have a separate system for tracking work orders for the actual jobs
as they flow through the production process.
The invoicing, collections, and AR aging are all done with the Solomon
AR module. In earlier releases of
Solomon, this customer used the Solomon Order processing modules to produce
invoices. When they upgraded to the latest
version of Solomon, we found that the invoices could be completely done with
the AR module and some minor customizations.
The Solomon customization manager module was used to add a field to the
Invoice/Memo Screen in AR to collect the Work Order number. A second field was added to capture the
customer’s purchase order number.
The Work
Order number needed to show on the invoice to the customer, so there was easy
cross reference between the manufacturing system and the accounting
system. As people started using
systems, they often see ways to improve things.
Such is the case with the use of the customization manager module
exposing a user field which was labeled on the data entry form: Work Order
The way
this solution was developed was to create a Visual Basic toolkit customization
which allowed a new table to be created which stored the Work Order number as a
key field in this table. The Work Order
number field was defined as not allowing duplicates. This feature is easy for our programmers to
create; giving the added feature to the customer that any time a duplicate work
order number was entered, then error messages were displayed a warning.
Once the
Work Order field was populated in the data entry screen, it is an easy matter
to use the Crystal Designer module to modify the invoice report to add in this field. This customer was able to move from using
multi page NCR forms for printing their invoices to doing all invoice printing
via a standard laser printer on plain paper.
This shift to using plain paper with a cost of about $0.02/ invoice was a
big cost saving from their NCR forms which cost about $0.26/invoice.
Creating
business rules which are unique to a specific customer’s needs is typical of
the flexibility of the Solomon solution.
No one understands what new needs or demands are going to be placed on
the enterprise reporting system. Solomon
has a long history of providing flexibility to adapt to these changing needs. Combining the power of visual basic code and
the Solomon Toolkit, it is amazing how far we can extend the power of Solomon.
If you
have a special need like this customer, give us a call. We will be happy to develop a quote for you.