• Bug fixes/enhancements relating to introduction of reserve orders
  • Buy/sell report stopped reporting stock received via orders. Now fixed
  • Import internet order. Could not process such an order as a 'reserve'. Now fixed.
• Bug fixes/enhancements relating to recently added restocking analysis tools
  • 'Close' button on some windows did not actually close the window when clicked on. Had to click on 'x' in top right (or press Esc key)
  • Give user option to indicate how often they generate a stock order. Previously c9 would figure this out by looking at how many stock orders were raised in the past 6 months. This technique is problematic; so give user option to expressly indicate.
  • Do not allow statistics generation on assumption of stock order less than every 14 days. Previously was 7 days. Data is too noisy at such a frequency of reordering.
• Workshop clock off. Warn if mechanic was clocked on overnight and provide a means to allow mechanic to set date/time when they really clocked off (defaults to 6 pm on the day the mechanic clocked on)
• Cancel/adjust spares order.  Would not update qty on order for workshop spares on order. Now fixed
• Package Info tweaks (to aid installation of new systems)
• Save/email invoice. Filename/email subject now contains name of the shop instead of 'c9'
• Account statement : make it clear if statement is in credit and does not require payment (portrait only)
• Fixes to handling of new customers on import web orders.

As of version 4.224, c9 now includes more sophisticated restocking analysis tools to help you manage your stock levels and avoid overstocking and understocking. The new set of tools provides:

• A sophisticated statistical model that makes restocking recommendations and responds to: sale history for last 18 months. list price of the item, and margin gain for stock ordering vs overnight ordering.
• Statistical model is able to recognise and cope with seasonal items (identifying high and low seasons), long term gradual trends and unusually high once off orders.
• Ability to tune the model, selecting either aggressive, modest or conservative restocking goals depending on how much stock you wish to maintain.
• Ability to tune the model on a per franchise basis. i.e. aggressively stock your principal franchise, and maintain more modest stocking levels for secondary franchises and accessory suppliers
• A 'flight simulator' that allows you to check how the model settings would perform based on last 6 months of business; showing you resulting overstocking (dead stock) and understocking (overnight ordering) if the model was used for all stock re-ordering. Allowing you to tune towards the mix that is suitable for your inventory.
• Ability to configure per-part hints and exceptions. i.e. 'never stock this part', or 'increasing reordering by 100% for this part'. i.e. sale history and list price are sometimes insufficient for decision making. i.e. things like oil filters you never want to run out of so it is appropriate to aggressively overstock these.
• Makes recommendations for items you do not currently stock but should and is able to resolve super-cession chains
• A redesigned analysis UI that instead of making you trawl through your entire stock, allows you to focus on items that may be potentially understocked or overstocked, so instead of exhaustively checking thousands of items, you only check the top 50 items.
• The ability to reorder based on preset maxqty levels or using the calculated numbers generated by restocking analysis

Important note: Restocking analysis of a part requires that the part has moved in at least 4 separate  restocking periods in the past 18 months.   A restocking period is amount of time on average between stock orders. If you've never placed a stock order for a brand new franchise for example, system assumes 30 days.  So say your restocking period is 2 weeks, then for a brand new item that you order for customers, c9 will not recommend you stock it for 8 weeks at absolute minimum.

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This version will upgrade the database and will force you to log all terminals out first

• Introduction of sophisticated restocking analysis tools. A separate post will be written shortly that explains how to use this new feature
• Fixed menu text when double clicking on item in workshop
• Allow selling of parts to booked workshop job
• Unit profit report. In date order
• Change how add new unit behaves when long references (i.e. full VINs) are used
• Tweaks/Fixes to Deloitte Honda data export
• Spares Quote : could not handle freeform items. Now fixed.

Happy Programmer day everybody.  In celebration, some awesome new changes are en-route. Belated delivery expected tomorrow.

This version will upgrade the database and will force you to log all terminals out first

• Removed deferred payments and added new system for reserving spares
• Compare terminal/server date & time. Under some circumstances the system will incorrectly assume that system date and time are incorrect. Fixed
• Spares point of sale. Removed confusing 'Amount left by customer field'. Replaced it with a button next to deposit which is used to help calculate how much deposit to claim in order to arrive at a given tendered amount.
• Terminal update: make it clear to user that clicking through terminal update screen will cause all their existing c9 sessions to shutdown
• Database scanner - recent changes for text searching on stock/master file meant that scanner no longer worked on these tables. Now fixed.
• Workshop add new unit. Modified unit add so it better copes with units with same/similar reference number. it will list details on all units that match and allow user to select if unit already in system. Otherwise it will automatically generate a unique reference # for a new unit.
• Print spares quote.  Ask user if they wish to suppress part numbers printed on a spares quote.
• Print unit invoice, under some conditions where there are alot of invoice line items the after invoice costs such as stamp duty would print on the second page. A customer would look at first page of the invoice and assume that the figure 'tax invoice total' is the figure to pay. Modified c9 so that tax invoice tally and after invoice costs will flow over onto a second page so that customer actively looks for a second invoice page.

As of pending version 4.223 of c9, a significant change will be made to c9.  An existing feature (deferred payments) will be completely removed and instead be replaced with an alternative and improved mechanism that achieves the same aim.

The primary purpose of this post is to alert dealers that use the deferred payments facility so that you are aware of the change before you upgrade.  Also this post will highlight how to solve an occasional spare parts selling arrangement: the ability to reserve stock for a cash customer, but not actually raise an invoice for the stock until they come in to receive the parts.

We try to avoid making significant changes to the software that modify the way the software is used for daily operation.  In this circumstance, we are of the view that the existing deferred payment system is broken and it weakens the c9 product so we taken the decision to remove it entirely from c9.    The primary reason why is that the solution is confusing and error prone and difficult to properly manage.  We instead went with a solution that merges behaviour of customer order processing so that the same process you use to process customer orders that have been received is the same process you use to process items placed on reserve.  This approach has numerous advantages which we hope will come clear to you as you use the new capability in c9.

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• Receive back ordered parts.  When receiving accessory parts also query user for supplier
• Synchronize MYOB/Quickbooks, do not attempt sync accessory received invoices where supplier is not know
• Configure labels, redesigned configure label screen so it is easier to configure for either A4 or dedicated labelling printers.

Bugfix.  When receiving orders, c9 is supposed to look at all active orders in the system and preferentially 'receive' parts for customer orders instead of restocking orders; without regard for numbering of original orders sent to supplier; i.e. a customer orders late, but a stock order is received with those parts : reassign those parts to the customer instead of stock.  Normally this works, but there is one rare situation where this reallocation would not occur and parts would go into stock instead of being allocated to the customer (customer parts would eventually be processed when those parts come in on later receive orders). This version fixes this rare situation.

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• View/Change part : add ability to move part to another franchise
• Naming convention change - 'master file' becomes 'price file'
• Naming convention change - 'odo' 'odometer' becomes 'odo/hour'
  • Note that most of code already did this but there were some key places in c9 that still referred to 'odometer'
• Minor visual/screen/naming tweaks
  • Hide status on select job
  • Rename max/min check to max check
  • Workshop other : remove images and access to 'other'. (Other is accessible via setup)
  • Workshop : hide items instead of disabling them where units package is installed
  • Account statements : rename couple of check boxes to remove some confusion about how this screen works

The holy grail of inventory control is the ability to forecast what customers are going to buy and when, order those parts from the supplier, and sell them to the customer before you pay the invoice to your supplier. And to never ever carry excess stock.

For 10 years or so now c8/c9 has offered some basic tooling that provides dealers an estimate of what stock re-order levels should be; i.e. max checker. It generates reasonable numbers based on analysing the sales figures for up to 12 months, but there are a number of things that cause it to generate poor results under some circumstances; such as sporadic/slow moving parts or seasonal stock.

With advent of c9 and some very powerful enabling technologies available to us, we are now exploring and testing more sophisticated statistical approaches to the problem of providing more material support to spare parts managers in their task of tuning restocking levels.  We are testing statistical models that encompass a dozen different variables and considerations, and we are tuning these models against 'flight simulators', that test how variation in different pre-set biases affect business profitability when it comes to stock control.

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