Newsletter 2000-09       Go Back October 4, 2000 Highlights: A few enhancements from the user's meeting ballot have recently been completed.

Hein Electric recently moved into their new corporate headquarters building and should be switching to their new Clear/Path LX5220 system shortly. Hein now has eight locations. For those who try to keep a current directory, the new address and phone numbers for Hein are: Shipping address: Billing/correspondence: Phone & fax numbers: HEIN ELECTRIC SUPPLY COMPANY 12745 W. Townsend St. Brookfield, WI 53005 PO Box 499 Butler, WI 53007-0499 Phone (262) 790-8400 Fax: (262) 790-5555 BJ Electric recently ordered the Trade Service Web Customer Service Center. This type of Web presence in the long run helps you get more business; in the short to intermediate term helps you retain business you might otherwise lose; and, in the short term, is a relatively inexpensive way to demonstrate you're a progressive company. Even if a big customer is not going to use WCSC right away, you could demonstrate it to him and point out the readily apparent fact that it's a lot slicker than what many of the big boys, like Grainger, offer. BJ Electric also recently completed a project that while, not major in scope, demonstrates a powerful aspect of the Clear/Path environment that other users may want to take advantage of. In order to interface to their Pitney Bowes shipping system, we needed to create one file for every qualifying shipping order to send to the Pitney Bowes PC. Rather than going through elaborate steps to automate the downloading of these files, we used the "shared disk directory" feature of the Clear/Path instead. The files were programmatically created in a PC compatible format and dropped into a unique directory (usercode). A couple of minor set up steps in NxServices on the NT side of the Clear/Path and Windows Explorer on the recipient PC, and voila, the files are accessible on the target PC. This approach not only makes sense when you have a bunch of little files to transfer throughout the day, but probably is a good idea for large files. For example, at some sites the Execusense download files can be rather large. There is no need to view these files in MCP native mode. They are only really used on the Execusense PC. So, rather than creating it once on the "A" and downloading it, the file could just be created in PC mode in a directory visible to the Execusense PC. The one thing we have not benchmarked is I/O performance. There is an outside chance that under the right conditions, the increased in I/O time required to write the output file in PC mode could be greater than the time it takes to download. That is not very likely, however. Laconia Electric recently began downloading the weekly Trade Service Price File Maintenance Service data via the Internet. This approach saves about $50 per month versus the traditional tape or diskette approach. A few enhancements from the user's meeting ballot have recently been completed: When doing an OI10 inquiry on the rebilled portion of a void and rebill, the screen now will indicate it's a rebill. The new buyer name field is also now displayed on the OI10 screen. You can now fax PO's directly at the end of the PO entry process. This saves the step of going to the OMS screen to send the fax. You can now control which documents each of the additional description lines on the inventory file will print on. The codes are as follows: P = Pick Tickets I = Invoices B = Both Pick Tickets and Invoices V = Vendor Purchase Orders A = All Documents N = None (Internal Use Only) Expedited line items are now highlighted on the II85 inquiry (open PO line items). The SI10 inquiry now shows the gross margin percentage.