We will be trialing a new SMS partner during the coming weeks.  C9's technical systems have now been modified so it can route SMS to two different providers. We will run them head to head and measure performance of them both.  There have been some lingering concerns that reliability of SMS delivery for our existing provider is not where it should be. This trial will allow us to see if this is indeed the case and if we can improve upon reliability.

It is expected that a percentage of SMS messages will fail : because of wrong/invalid number.  Also it is expected at a percentage of SMS will not be receipted because although the number is valid the phone is switched off or out of service range for an extended duration.  The figures for our deliveries in past 12 months seems typical for delivery rates, though it never hurts to try and improve.

Figures around 96/97% seem fairly typical based on my prior professional experience in mobile telephony.  December is low possibly because lots of dealers did SMS based compaigns to their customer database.  Campaigns are expected to to yield lower success rates compared to say workshop service/parts order notifications as you'd expect the quality/accuracy of your phone number database for active customers waiting for notification to be much higher than a database that include old customer contact details.

Also 2013 figures are quite good compared to previous years figures suggesting that our existing SMS provider has made steady improvements to their infrastructure, particularly with unreceipted messages. We also made changes to our own systems to more thoroughly search for delivery receipts for messages which have not been properly receipted to help bring unknown % rate down.

Still we will try and see if a new provider improves things for us and work with the best.  We can now retain two different providers for redundancy.

Note that c9 only bills for successful SMS deliveries. A successful SMS is an SMS that is receipted by the mobile phone. A receipt is a signal/notification sent from the mobile handset back to us where the phone acknowledges receipt of the SMS. It is possible that a handset will receive an SMS correctly but the receipt does not make it back to us.  For these SMS's  c9 errs on the assumption the phone did not receive the SMS and dealers are not billed for these.

Small bugfix introduced with prior version and some general tidy up around a confusing aspect of configuring orders.

Previously you could move a part from daily order to stock order via orderbook/view order.  New version disabled this functionality if following option was not set in main setup : "Allow user to select daily or stock ordering at POS".   Fixed so that you can move parts in orderbook/view order onto a stock order irrespective of this setting.

I've also tweaked point of sale to ignore this traditionally problematic setting altogether.  The setting now should have no influence in c9 (though I've left it in the setu pscreen for now).  When you go into orders in point of sale you now will always have the option to assign it to either daily or stock.  If franchise is configured to only support daily/stock then in point of sale this is respected and relevant option is disabled.  The franchise setting is not respected in orderbook though, so you can always force a part onto a stock or daily order if you wish after point of sale.

Requires database changes. You need to log all terminals out first.

More flexible ordering : feature growth in c9 that allows you to easily track down alternative sources for parts via F12 magician lookup has exposed a growing weakness in c9's order management model which is now fixed in this version.  The ability to manage ordering of parts from alternative suppliers.  Consider a point of sale experience where you are ordering Suzuki parts.  Say you are a Suzuki dealer, or you normally order from a dealer such as D&R Motorcycles,  but the part you want is currently not available from your regular supplier. After pressing F12 magician lookup you notice Mick Hone can supply it.  C9 now allows you to modify in point of sale where you intend to get parts from.  The design allows you, in point of sale indicate some parts will come from your normal supplier and others from someone else.  In point of sale you can modify these too.  Illustrating:

The first part is supplied, the second will be placed on a daily order for normal franchise order.  The 3rd on a stock order for normal franchise order.  The 4th though will be put on an order to be sent to Mick Hone.

MICKHONE is added as an accessory supplier in c9.  This new version of c9 allows you to add parts from any franchise onto the order for an accessory supplier. The system even allows you to order parts of different franchises onto the same order.  i.e. on an accessory order to BOLTONMC for example, you could mix KTM and Honda parts.

A near future version of c9 will allow you to easily place a part on order from an alternative supplier from F12 magician lookup, for c9 dealers that come up in magician as being able to supply the part you do a lookup on.  The near future version will also permit automatic transmission of the order to the dealer if the dealer has a c9 based  online shopping website when the point of sale process is completed.

This change introduces a few minor/ancillary  tweaks

• In point of sale the type of order for each individual part (daily,stock, other) is now displayed
• In point of sale, when you put a part on order you now have the option indicating whether the part should be put on a new/existing sent order as opposed to putting it on an active order.  This is to be used, like ad-hoc orders, to cope with the situation where you manually order the part over the phone but wish to have c9 track the part on order after the initial manual order
• Point of sale forget/order/sell screen now removes ability to order on daily/stock.  When you select order a new screen opens up where you select daily/stock and now new option to order from alternate supplier
• Point of sale again : if you highlight a part and press F11 you can now modify order specifics for the highlighted part. Previously F11 in this mode would open up screen to add a new ad-hoc order item
• In orderbook/view order you can similarly modify a parts order status. Moving it from daily/stock order to a accessory supplier 3rd part order and also toggle status of item from active to sent.

Manual backups : a significant bug with manual backups has been fixed in this version.  If you rely on online backups no need to worry, these are fine and not affected by this bug.  For manual backups the system does not generate correct backup files for dates where year  is  than 4 digits, i.e anything before 1000 AD.  The backup files save the date in a recognizable format, but on restore the database will reject the restore because it sees the date as ambiguous. For example Nov 4 2013 is written as '2013-11-4',  Nov 4 13 AD should be written as '0013-11-4', but old version of c9 wrote it as '13-11-4' : postgreSQL database could not interpret this unambiguously so it would fail on restore.  Old backup files can be reconstructed and repaired but the process is time consuming and tedious.  New backup files created after this update will work fine.  Again problem only manifests if you rely on manual backups and only if your c9 database contains crap data, there is no reason why you should be keying in any date prior to 1900 or so.  Not even entirely sure how dealer in question got 13 AD in their database : I cannot make it happen on my system no matter how hard I try.

Minor tweak:

• Fix width of website discount % entry field in view/change part
• Print statement : ignore creditor/debtor flag on account.

Requires database changes, you will need to log all terminals out during upgrade

• Account balance limit : was based on merged trial balance. Tweaked to work on debtor trial balance only. (omission in prior changes to trial balance separation, forgot to separate balances in this business rule)
• Part kits with custom pricing would sometimes not land on the kit price manually entered and be a few cents out due to rounding errors. Now fixed.  System now arrives at custom pricing by jiggling line discounts.  This also factors in kit discount giving on web orders.
• Print open deal : was not printing customer details correctly
• Part/Buy Sell  :  buttons to view invoice/customer on lower order panel would actually open view on selected item in upper invoice panel.  Now fixed
• Cancel order : don't allow user to cancel parts on order for customer/workshop etc.  Too many people making mistakes cancelling the wrong order. Force users to cancel parts/invoices manually in this instance
• Cancel part on order : detect if last part on an invoice and if so check if there is deposit to be refunded and take appropriate action
• Mail merge : allow windows to be resized and fill text area out to the resized window
• Supplier Warranty management : distinguish between lodged claims and finished claims to make it easier t o manage claims in progress
• Customer notification : when reviewing SMS notifications for received parts the wrong invoice number would be recorded in notification.  Notification's work perfectly, but the recorded invoice is incorrect. Happens on receives dealing with multiple invoices.  Should now be fixed.

Requires database changes, you will need to log all terminals out during upgrade

This version significantly changes how the system manages customer balances.  It explicitly separates out balances into debtor and depositor balances which result in more robust trial balance figures for accounting reporting.  A number of other related changes/benefits flow from this

• A number of customer related operations are now faster. Balance retrieval calculations will be faster (though was already quick so unlike to be noticed).  Printing statements very much noticeably faster.
• Adding transactions is now simpler and easier.  Adding all different types of transactions is now done from the one screen. Previously there were two separate screens.  The new single screen is easier to use.  Stronger visual clues as to what is happening. No longer a requirement to fill in, tab through, aged trail adjustments as c9 now calculates this automatically (you can override if you like).
• Print statement screen redesigned for easier use
• System now explicitly tracks recording of refunded invoices and refunded debtor payments : so there should no longer be a need to use credit/debit notes (these are still in place)
• Balance on deposit and balance on debit now kept separate so easier to handle debtor customers who have put down deposit at the same time.

Also includes tweaks to check/constrain sizing of images and attachments.  Recent activities with people sending bulk Christmassy mailouts with attached movie files or images which are 12MB and CMYK encoded has been playing havoc with our storage and bandwidth constraints. So added some further sanity checks for size and encoding to keep things sensible.

A very frustrating few days shifting our web infrastructure around.  Frustrating and stressful like fixing a bike mid-race.

Changes are almost complete.  Worked quite hard to ensure a smooth transition,  though there have been two major incidents which really should not of happened.

One: a major changeover happened on Friday. The change was relatively smooth though a serious problem went unnoticed for 24 hours.  Online shopping checkouts failed at the point were you entered in a credit card.  Cause of the problem was a missing security/encryption library on new webserver. I noticed this on Saturday morning.  I really should of tested and noticed this prior to Friday so entirely my fault.  All web orders on Friday involving a credit card would of failed.  All the user would of seen was a blank webpage : which is not that indicative of a serious problem.

Second: on Monday our web hosting company were to implement changes to further cement in the new web site.  The task was scheduled for 1 am in the morning but did not proceed for some unknown reason.  I gave them the nod to do it during the day if it will only take a minute or two. Fairly standard request but lots went wrong.  Network access to our websites was unstable throughout the day with multiple outages and it was clear to me that the hosting company could not quickly diagnose or fix the problem.  I ended up instituting changes myself, after a crash course in networking, to bring sites back up.  Still not quite there but at least sites should be good.

A few more hurdles to get over.  Hopefully all the outages are now behind us and it is just tidy up. Moving forward, new web infrastructure should serve our growing needs for a long time to come and when it is time to once again to expand our web gear, the new layout will make future expansion simpler.

Bring on the weekend

Includes database changes. You will need to log all terminals out during upgrade

• Print job card : order of items on job card was not consistent. Now fixed to print in same order as seen on screen
• Get Kawasaki Diagrams and query Kawasaki available stock stopped working due to changes to Kawasaki's website. Adjusted c9 to cope with this
• Workshop jobs now include the notion of  private job history. Add private notes onto jobs.
• Unit deals:  system was not memorizing discounts/price changes on spares added to a deal but not invoiced at time of add so when deal was finalized c9 would revert to RRP without discount. Modified c9 so it does retain these changes.
• C9 printer tweaks. One dealership with a flaky network printer had to exit c9 from time to time as c9 lost track of the printer. Temporary changes to c9 seem of fixed this problem for the dealer so this version now incorporates those changes (specifically c9 would retain a cache of available printers. It still does this but it now drops the cache whenever a printer error is encountered, allowing c9 to self-heal in event of printer error)

• Bugfixes
• Convert unit deal into invoice.  Was not writing a business record to show consumption of deposit. Now fixed
• Rounding bug with set web discount.  Setting $ figure would sometimes yield a % figure whose rounded $ figure was greater than the keyed in figure. Now fixed.
• Spares invoices with line items whose unit price was >=10,000 would not print line item price. Now fixed
• Tweaks
• View customer : hotkey tabs for quick keyboard only switching from one screen to the next
• Main Workshop screen : allow users to clock onto jobs from here instead of having to memorize job number and key it in via clock function
• Tender change for workshop or spares. Now factors in payment methods that flagged as 'tender change'. i.e. if you pay $170,  $70 in eftpos and $100 in cash the system will calculate tender/ change on $100 , not the full amount of the invoice.  Same for sales involving part of a voucher
• Couple of minor visual improvements for point of sale to make it easier for new users to use.  Specifically provide visual buttons for hidden hot key functionality such as adding/modify/deleting parts on invoice and make it more obvious/easier on how to change customer/job/unit associated with the invoice.
• Changed wording on select payment method screens to make using multiple vouchers or a mix of vouchers+cash more intuitive.

This morning we have commissioned more web database servers.

The servers provide us with more storage capacity and more redundancy.

Also you should notice that  web page load times feel more responsive especially parts diagrams should now feel near instantaneous.  Previously load times were approx 1 second to load a parts diagram onto the screen.  Load times are now several times quicker than this.  There are further things we will be doing over the coming weeks to improve this even more.

C9 will now generate miner report to fulfill reporting connected to Honda Bulletin SBMC1316.

To generate,  goto miner.  Select load standard query. Select the query under 'Honda' section called 'Service Record'.  Click process query and select reporting period.