C9, and some of our competitor DMS platforms, offer the ability to query available stock while in the middle of point of sale.

In c9, you select a part on screen and press the 'F12' key. It will query for quantity held by the supplier.

For example:

For dealers, this ability is a massive time saver; and saves them the hassle to login to a dealer website and re-key the part number in order to query to see if the item is in the country; or call the supplier to query for the part.  The result is better experience for everyone, the spare parts manager, the supplier and importantly the customer on the other side of the counter.

For suppliers to offer this feature to C9 or other DMS they need to publish some sort of Internet based integration application programming interface that will allow DMS platforms to connect in.

The industry standard for such technology integration, which C9 has implemented with suppliers to date is SOAP based Web Services Description Language (WSDL).  A supplier defines a service accessible via the Internet and provides DMS vendors such as C9 the .wsdl file, or tells us where the wsdl file can be found. e.g. http://www.supplier.com.au/api/query?wsdl

The API typically defines the following:

Input

The Part number

(Optional) the quantity required

Output

The quantity in stock. or return some indicator of no quantity.

A supplier is under no obligation to report their actual warehouse holdings. It is common for suppliers to return values of 'N/C', 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. For quantities >5 the supplier API returns the literal value '>5'. For example.

Although WSDL is a technology standard, it is not necessarily an easy standard for technology developers to work with and simpler integrations are possible.  A common alternative, recommended by C9 for it's simplicity and used by many web integration organisations, such as SMS traffic providers, is to use a basic HTTP GET API call.  For such an operation the supplier publishes a basic web site. To submit a request,  c9 will send something like this as a web request:

http://www.supplier.com.au/api/query?partnumber=XYZ

The supplier website simply replies with a basic webpage, containing something like this:

INSTOCK QOH:3

or

NOTINSTOCK

A Working Example

On C8 website is a working example, that queries stocking level for the developer test database.

Query for an existing part:

http://c8software.com.au/example/query.php?partnum=321002E

http://c8software.com.au/example/query.php?partnum=0025080406

Query for a not carried part:

http://c8software.com.au/example/query.php?partnum=1234

The source code for this is very simple PHP script using a PostgreSQL backend database.

<?php
        $db=pg_connect("host=localhost port=5432 dbname=c9online user=c9online");
        $part= pg_escape_string($_GET['partnum']);
        $result = pg_query($db,
                "SELECT qtyonhand from stock where partnum='{$part}' ".
                "and franchise=43 and bk_owner=1");
        if (!$result) {
                echo "ERROR";
        } else {
                $row=pg_fetch_row($result);
                if (isset($row[0])) {
                        echo "STOCKED:",$row[0];
                } else {
                        echo "N/C";
                }
        }
?>

A DMS such as C9 can now easily access the web page inside the software to get part quantities. For example a Unix shell script of wget command:

wget -qO - http://c8software.com.au/example/query.php?partnum=0025080406
STOCKED:9