C9 for years has used 3of9 as it's barcoding system. Only just learned that 3of9 is not very space efficient. Currently experimenting with alternate code sets and results look very interesting. Likely to include into next version of c9 to allow you to print bigger barcodes and/or print on smaller labels.
C9 has provided the industry online OEM diagrams and shopping since 2011. We now have over 20 dealers running OEM shopping websites with OEM parts from over a dozen different manufacturers. C9 is, by a huge margin, the market leader in providing modern technology designed for a modern retail environment in the motorcycle industry.
Recently Suzuki Australia has began to offer their own solution, in conjunction with a 3rd party web site designer Fox Digital Web, giving dealers more choice for online EPC. A dealer can assess which solution they feel works best for them. We believe that c9's solution is a better solution for dealers. Some of the reasons why we believe our offering is best:
Inventory checking for Yamaha is now possible. The process of configuring it although is slightly complex.
The complexity arises because Yamaha require something known as a 'client side certificate' in order to access their site. C9 can handle this no worries, the only additional complexity from c9's point of view is you need to give c9 a Certificate file and the password for that file.
The real complexity although is getting the certificate file in the first place.
If Yamaha have provided it in an email, you can try and just add it into c9 as is and you might get lucky.
Otherwise you need to extract the certificate out of Internet Explorer. This process is complex. Read on for more details.
C9 provides the ability to import inventory from a excel style spread sheet. For example:
This can be useful for a number reasons, such as importing the results of a data dump from a cordless barcode scanner.
Parts Magician is a service created 9 years ago to allow motorcycle dealers query one another for obscure parts to help reduce dead stock.
The service was moderately successful, but not nearly as successful as we originally hoped. Though in the last 18 months two distinct things have happened that have triggered a dramatic increase in usage and in particular have delivered alot of value to c9 customers. (Parts magician is not just a c9 product BTW, it is used by many dealers that do not use c9 as their DMS).
Parts Magician was originally designed on an open architecture and openly encouraged all DMS vendors to provide automated integration because we recognized early on that this is a key ingredient for success. No DMS vendor took up the offer.
An important recent learning which we did not realise then is that the integration needs to connect all the way into actual point of sale; a single button press provides instantaneous Australia wide query.
Other organisations, a car industry consortium, whose name I've long forgotten, offered alternative approaches though their technology was extremely cumbersome, complex and created risky network security profiles for dealers also tried and failed. Some suppliers have tried web based upload and query solutions with very limited success.
It is heartening to see that 9 years on, parts magician over the past 18 months has finally unlocked a means to significantly increase it's value to those who use it.
Options feasibly exist for us to build further on parts magician technology to include modernised integration techniques (i.e. web services), and to build upon recent learnings.
C9's import of KTM catalogs imports information from KTM's dealernet website. The website although contains all KTM's manufactured world wide, not just Australian models. So c9 tries to be 'smart' and only import Australian models. The logic though does not correctly import all models although.
For example, SX-F models and EXC. In Australia, I believe that SX-F used in Australia are the US models and EXC are European. C9 by default skips these thinking they are overseas models.
Following describes how to do work around this.
c9 online websites with fiche diagrams categorize diagrams into different sections. i.e. 'Rear Wheel', 'Wiring Harness' etc. C9 does this by looking at the name of a diagram and matching it against a rule to figure out what category it is.
The rules built into c9 are tuned originally for Honda and KTM early 2011 but little work has happened since then and there is no consistency across suppliers. Result is as of time of writing this, of the 1.2 million diagrams hosted on c9 powered websites, 15% of those diagrams are located in the 'Uncategorized' section on the website.
Managing mapping of diagrams is tedious work, which is why we created tools in c9 so that you can do this task :-). Read on for more
Toro part lists have a interesting feature that no other supplier we have dealt with in the last 20+ years have. Toro contains duplicate part numbers which are sensitive to location of dashes. For example:
| Part Number | Description |
|---|---|
| 100-3017 | PIN-ARM, LIFT |
| 1003017 | REAR WHEEL AXLE |
| 325-11 | SCREW-HH[.500-13X2.750,GRZ,YZ] |
| 3251-1 | SCREW-PPH[10-24 X 3/7 GR 2 YZ] |
C9 can now support such setups. Read on for more details
Sometimes you may need to do a forceful reimport of fiche diagrams; typically because of a BFU as Dave calls them; a type of programming bug. Adding the ability to import catalogs into c9 is a fiddly and delicate business; and getting it spot-on is a significant software engineering challenge for us; our error rate for bugs in this part of c9 is substantially higher than our overall defect rate. Occasionally we will release versions that fix catalogue importers that require data already imported to be removed and import to be redone all over.
Following explains how to do this.
Like a neighbourhood burglar alarm that goes off with the slightest provocation; backup error emails are really starting to annoy me.
Actual backups are working correctly. The problem is that the process of verifying that the backup is an exact copy of your database sometimes returns an error when in fact the databases are perfect replicas. This sends emails overnight incorrectly stating that there are backup errors.
The cause is largely the recent addition of fiche diagrams into c9. These increase the size of the database significantly. This increases the time it takes for online backup to perform a verification cycle. Because of the increase in verification time there is increased chance that while a verification is in progress, a change to the database is made that invalidates the verification. Result : a false alarm.
I will rethink the design of online backups and come up with a method that eliminates the inherent 'race condition' (as it is known in IT lingo), that triggers the false alarm during verification.
Inclusion of fiche diagrams has been a great addition to c9; but it has not been without its technical challenges; which we are slowly mastering and resolving.
Update: Worked out a better system. Deployed bulk of changes to our webserver. Will take a few days to monitor and ensure it is working as designed before complete migration to new verification methods; but if they are working correctly should provide instant relief. Next version of c9 will also include some minor changes to remove some 'race conditions' that exist in c9 itself during the process of creating verification statistics; but this is a much lesser issue than the server issues now corrected. False alarms are generated mainly because of how our backup web server was doing its job of cross checking fidelity of the backup. Another advantage of new system is that our webserver will generally be much more responsive. Verification workload on server has now been significantly reduced. Previously, running verification would load the webserver so much you could notice a difference in performance when loading our web pages for example; but new design this no longer happens. Also, I expect that online backup will be alot quicker, especially when installing a new system, as server code has now been tuned for increased performance.
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