Information Systems:WebSmart History
A replacement was needed for the EOB (Electronic Order Book), which was a program installed on shareholder and customer PC’s. More functionality was wanted, and it would no longer function after 999 weeks of use (‘week’ was a three digit field).
Web Orders went live June 29, 2005; week 999 was February 19, 2011. Excel wrote it, and did a major update in late 2009 / early 2010. We can make changes and additions to it ourselves; but don’t have Excel’s experience, and knowledge of new tools and innovations.
In November 2006 we started developing item and partner maintenance in WebSmart. The purpose was to have a single program for each that would do all maintenance – instead of the existing multiple menu options in both ASW and Extensions to add a single item or partner. As it was to be a single program writing and reading a single browser page that included all information, full editing and validation could be done.
Previously, uniPHARM had a simple web portal called ‘InfoNet’ – the name stuck when we replaced it with the new programs.
We realized that WebSmart was an ideal tool for data analysis. We could prompt the user for various selection, summary, and sort criteria, build a SQL statement to extract the requested information, then display it. After this program had been developed once, we then used it as a template to give us more and more varied information. Sometimes the SQL took too long to give the user the required information, or the data extract was too complicated; so we came up with two other methods. As part of our overnight process, we build several of the files used by InfoNet. For example, XXSTATSP, which for each item gives totals by the last twelve months for sales, lost sales, and forecasts. Another method used is to build a work file when the user presses ‘search’, then have the program use that work file.
Using sample code from Excel’s web site, we were able to add graphs, and the ability to export a file to Excel (the spreadsheet – not the company).
In about 2005, we had installed a business intelligence tool call InfoManager. Every night the data warehouse would be updated with the day’s transactions, and every Saturday the entire day was spent recalculating all the summaries. Those summaries had been updated every night, but started getting out of sync immediately. We wanted shareholders to be able to use InfoManager to look at summaries of their purchases from us, but it would not have been feasible to add them all as users on the i; both because of the increased cost of the license, and the load on the system of the extra users. So instead, we used the option to send the information in an email every month. It was an image only, not something shareholders could load into a spreadsheet.
It has a big job to keep this going. The process had to be babysat on the first of every month – no matter what the day. Then an update to InfoManger broke it, and the vendor was not able to fix it. We were able to limp along, but in September 2012 replaced it with a WebSmart program in Web Orders that the user could run themselves, and export the data to a spreadsheet.
In October 2014, we had Excel (the company this time) create the frame work for a dashboard, into which we put programs that we had developed to replace InfoManager. (Support had dwindled to practically nothing, and charts took a very long time to call up – users would call a dashboard then go for coffee. For all this, we paid $25,000 a year.) The replacement analytical programs we wrote with WebSmart are completely flexible, and take seconds to run.