Wholesale Distribution Reporting System

The Challenge

The client’s firm, a wholesale distribution software consulting company based in LA, California, provided complete business solutions to its customers using an ERP solution (based on the Progress 9.1D database). Their sales/purchase reporting, accounting, and inventory reporting application was too small and required a redesign to make it easier and faster to respond to financial data from multiple companies in a group, with better visual reporting and reporting capabilities to cater to usability requirements of the potential customers.

ValueCoders took this challenge and designed a robust, modular, scalable, and configurable software, a desktop application, to meet the end-user or customer needs.

Tasks

When they hired ValueCoders, we had to address the following tasks:

• A comprehensive business solution was required to manage financial data for multiple companies in a group
• Client-side should be focussing on various challenges and demands faced by the distribution industry
• A distribution reporting system with better visual &  text reporting features

While developing, we faced various challenges including the following ones:

• Gathered all risks and impact from the system
• To display huge datasets in real-time from a Progress database
• Developing a single system to tackle all these risks and problem

Our developers at ValueCoders had overcome these challenges with their innovative ideas and technical expertise.

Solution

The existing application restricted the data view for a single company and an individual account. An inquiry function was required to access sales, finance, accounting, cash and other relevant details for multiple companies and all cash accounts based on daily, weekly, quarterly, month to date, year to date, one year ago.

So, there was a need to develop an efficient solution in order to meet the client’s requirements. As a result, a .NET desktop application with new query screens, which show data for all cash, sales, purchases and inventory values ​​along with the accounting screen is developed.

The application allows users to view and manage up to 9 years of data, and each module offers views of data from previous and current years, which facilitates the comparative analysis. It provides well-defined visual aids, such as bar charts and calibration graphs, simpler data structuring, data export to Excel, scheduled reports.

It comes with the following features:

• Configurable Gauge Graphs
• Customizable Toolbar
• Windowed Data Browsers
• Preferences/User Settings

This application first set up connectivity with Progress to first collect data to a SQL server database and thus help in easily modifying & displaying details on Dashboard system in close to real-time response time, keeping the offset within an acceptable range.

The expert team at ValueCoders developed a .NET desktop application with new inquiry screens, showing data for sales, cash accounts, inventory values, and purchases along with the accounting screen. The application facilitates comparative analysis and allows viewing and managing of up to 9 years of data where each module offers views of both currents as well as previous year data.

Moreover, it provides full visual aids like bar charts, simple data structuring, gauge graphs, and auto-scheduling of reports on a daily basis. The application provides following user-friendly features:

• Configurable Gauge Graphs- it is used to change the gauge graph calibration to meet the client’s needs.
• Customizable Toolbar- with which you can choose from the available multiple screens.
• User Settings/ Preferences-to save graph settings, criteria-screen selections, decimal places.
• User Settings/ Preferences-to save graph settings, criteria-screen selections, decimal places.