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.

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

New tables in view customer window:

• 'Invoiced units' :  show all units sold/purchased/on deal/on consignment for the selected customer.  Easily access invoice reprinting (previous method to retrieve an invoice report was cumbersome, new tab makes reprinting easy)
• 'Activity' : provides a view of all activity on the customer similar to output in Business -> Activity except only shows activity specific for the selected customer

Print barcodes.  Adding parts now more intelligent

• Checks if keyed/scanned barcode is same as highlighted part.
• Performs canonicalization of parts as per point of sale (i.e. strip leading 0s, follow supercessions)
• Checked if keyed/scanned barcode has not already been added to barcode list)

Visual tweak to setup screen. Last update included an option that was visible on all tabs : should of only been visible on spares 2 tab.

Print barcodes from received order.  New option in setup allows you to print barcodes for parts received for customer as well as parts received for stock.  Only receipt/reserve/invoice parts. Does not print for parts ordered for workshop or sales department.

• Quickbooks sync : allow CostOfGoodsSold+Expense accounts to be selected when selecting account to assign freight to (previously would only allow you to access Expense accounts)

• Export OPEA Order : recent changes broke c9's ability to memorize whether or not order was to be saved as a file or emailed.  A significant problem when exporting Suzuki orders. Now fixed.

• Import KTM Fiche : another attempt to get importing of Dukes working.  Also automatically filter out X-Bow.

• Workshop - ability to define special type of workshop job for tracking sale of parts to the workshop as an overall department. Slightly experimental idea.  At the moment it is bare bones, if it flies will develop further with supporting reports etc.

To setup goto Setup -> Other Settings -> Internal Workshop Jobs

Create a job in the list , like this:

Now in spares, point of sale. When you F10 a job and select workshop,  internal jobs will be visible at the top of the select job list.  Internal jobs are only visible when you go to them via Point of Sale Complete.  In normal workshop mode, they are invisible.