Happy Birthday COP10

 

Lake Forest, CA, September 15, 2004 – By Dan Diesel

Today we celebrate the 20th birthday of our implementation of the Customer Sales and Support system. On Saturday, September 15th, 1984 we implemented all the programs to process a customer order including order entry, shipping, invoicing, and automatic credit approval. A team of 5 programmers along with many of our inside sales, warehouse, and accounting associates designed this software to fit our needs. This process took 9 months. Their efforts still serves us today.

As we have with many other parts of our ePREDATOR software, we are continuing to make major improvements. You have already seen the improved order search capabilities along with the new order tracker feature. In the coming months, we will be changing many of the other displays and adding features. Some of the major improvements will include:

1. New comment support. You will be able to enter multi-line comments and route them to print and/or display to different departments.

2. New order detail displays. (This is the display you see when you press F4). In addition to the current view which will be available with only minor changes, we will support many other different ways to look at the same order. For example, there will be a Profit view that will show gross margin by line and help to research pricing errors. There will be a Warehouse view so during shipping you only see the fields that pertain to shipping. Also, it will be very easy for us to design new additional views, so we will only be limited by your imagination and input.

3. Redesigned services display (F7) with more options. We will eliminate much of the clutter from this display. If additional information (such as a credit memo reason code) is required, a separate display will pop up.

The major driving force of these changes is to allow us to continue to offer the best order processing system available. Under the covers, there are new programming options and techniques that did not exist in 1984. For example, in one section of the search program, we replaced 900 lines of programming code with 20 lines using these new options. By rewriting the programs, we reduce their complexity and make future maintenance easier. Also, we are writing code that is totally compatible with new technologies so we should be able to continue to improve what we offer you and make your jobs as easy as possible.