[ic] Elementary Interchange questions

Michael Goldfarb interchange-users@icdevgroup.org
Thu Sep 26 19:26:02 2002


>I haven't even scratched the surface of Interchange, but
>it clearly looks like the kind of thing my client needs. I installed
>it on my laptop and demo'ed it for them at their office earlier
>today.
>
>To say they were thrilled is an understatement. They had two
>reservations however, and I couldn't find an answer. My apologies
>
>
>The two reservations were:
>
>1. Occasionally a circumstance arises where a user will order
>   say, a quantity of 10 specific widgets and they only have
>   7 in stock (whatever the reason, shrinkage, miscalculation,
>   don't want to reveal stock to customers, etc).  What they'd like
>   to do in this case is simply have the order adjusted and ship
>   the 7 instead of the user's originally requested 10. There's no
>   apparant place to tell Interchange about this.
>
>   Their legacy system supports this. In addition to a quantity ordered
>   field, there's a quantity shipped field.
>   Were we blind and just happened to miss this in Interchange?
>
>2. They mentioned something about synchronizing inventory against
>   vendor purchase orders. The workflow was explained thusly:
>
>       Manager decides to replenish stock. Going into Interchange, they
>       select the items and quantity they'd like reordered. When
finished,
>       Interchange produces a purchase order for each vendor. They
>       send these orders to each vendor (or read it to them, whatever).
>       When the vendor delivers, the manager compares what actually
>       shipped to what was ordered and updates Interchange accordingly.
>      
>   Is this supported?  If not, would it be hard to do?

As you will find with Interchange, the program can be as robust and
powerful as your knowledgebase allows. The question of whether or not
those 2 things are "hard to do" depends on your level of knowledge going
in.

I do not believe that either of your requests are in the base Foundation
files and will therefore need to be programmed by you.

I can say that we have already implemented your item #1 above and with a
some SQL item #2 shouldn't be too difficult.

Again, the main point is that *anything* is possible as long as you know
what you are doing and/or are willing to learn.