Our client is a stationery and art supplies
wholesaler with some 14,000 stock lines, 8,000 customers and they process
approximately 15,000 invoice details lines per day, 5 days a week. We have
previously developed a custom stock control, point of sale and share holders
register and integrated these with a commercial accounting application. The
client now wishes to provide their customers with the option of Web and Email
based ordering as well as electronic transmission of stock price lists,
invoices, statements and promotional literature and to provide their telephone
order taking staff with a more intuitive and sales oriented ordering system.
Their traveling sales force are also be included in this new system with the
long term aim of providing them with remote electronic order entry and customer
purchase history enquiry facilities. This has led them to have us develop a
complete business solution. This is to be developed in phases with stock, sales,
sales analysis, sales management and warehousing to be developed first followed
by purchase ordering, suppliers control, web and email integration, share
holders, membership and a property/business sales system (they also have a
Business Brokerage business as a subsidiary).
We have selected to do the front-end development
work in for the first phase at least in VB 6 and MS SQL Server. The third party
tools to be used will be Data Dynamics Active Reports v2 Pro (version 1 was the
best report writer ever written but we are now looking to implement the new
version), Active Bar v2.0 also from Data Dynamics and your Grid Tools control.
The system will be required to support 40 in-house users, 5 traveling sales
staff plus access by their 8,000 customers.
"Fast, efficient data entry
without the necessity of developing huge amounts of code"
As for why we have looked so favorably upon Grid
Tools; it is the only grid that inherently works the way data entry staff have
always worked. That is, by pressing "Enter" to move between fields. Its support
for read only columns, aggregate calculations, numeric only input, date entry
and MRU functionality is excellent. The property pages are intelligently
designed and actually assist in minimizing coding for the developer. This means
a reduction in development time, less chance of programmatical errors and as a
result a better result for the end user. The features you have included in Grid
Tools are those required for data entry and not just a whole bunch of features
to be able to include in a sales brochure for your product. We became frustrated
try to come to grips with so called "extensive object models" and pretty user
interface features like Alpha Blending when what is required is a Grid to
support fast, efficient data entry without the necessity of developing huge
amounts of code. One of the grids we evaluated fired events in such an illogical
sequence that to create an invoice entry application resulted in have 12 flags
to bypass events that caused problems. With Grid Tools that same test
application required minimal coding effort. Admittedly we have only spent some
40 man hours reviewing Grid Tools at this point and over the weekend we intend
to redevelop an application we recently wrote for a public accounting firm that
required more intricate data entry features within a grid environment, if Grid
Tools performs as we expect it will we will stick with it and forget the rest.
We expect to be looking at your PIM control in
the near future for inclusion within our sales management system for the
traveling sales force.
Kind regards,
Grant Spencer
The Synectics Group Pty Ltd
Burnside, South Australia
