Method Community

Am wondering if anyone is already doing this....

I am in the process of creating custom tables, screens, functionality in Method for my business. Basically, we have ~300 regular customers set up on 'programs'...which is basically a bunch of products we sell them throughout the year. These programs are created yearly, with moderate additions/subtractions/changes throughout the year on each program (e.g. a customer decides to cancel a program's May product delivery, or maybe a customer decides to add some work we are scheduled to do for them in September). So if you look at a 'program' it's basically a list of future orders throughout the year.

What I want to do is automate Method to look ahead at the dates on each of these 'programs' and create orders automatically.

How does Method allow me to create this functionality?

Is anyone already doing this now? Thoughts?

Thanks

Blake,

When you refer to orders are you talking about work orders? Based on what criteria do you want these work order created? Specific intervals? Have you taken a look at Method Field Services?

-Michael

Hi Blake

We have done a couple of projects that have some of this functionality.  Are you looking for a solution provider to help or is the a DIY project?

Thanks Michael...

I had not looked at Field Services yet...I'm reading about it now. It seems like the method of working in Field Services might work for how we currently operation.

Right now, salesmen write up actual carbon copy orders about 60 days out from delivery based on the afore mentioned 'programs' they set up for each customer. The order then gets replicated as a different paper here in the office called a 'shipment authorization' which is just a document that a customer might sign when they receive a delivery. This ship auth is also used to write other notes about the order (which may be service work rather than product delivery) for the field guys to use outside the office. When the work is done (e.g. product delivered or service work completed), then the ship auth is of course put in a particular place in the office and that means it's time to Invoice the customer for the order amount.

I'm definitely going to add Field Services to my Full Blown/Pro try to mimic our current process and see if it can work for us.

I would still like to get my salesmen away from creating orders manually (whether it's entering on a keyboard or writing up a carbon copy order like they do now) and have Orders (maybe Work Orders if Field Services fits) automatically created, though.

Thanks Mark...

I've been approaching this from a DIY standpoint. When you say 'some of this functionality' can you elaborate a bit (not looking for all the details here, of course) on the solutions you provided?

Michael...answering your other questions:

The criteria for automatically creating orders would be based on a date. Usually it's 60 days out that an Order is created and comes in house. That way we make sure we have the inventory (if it's an order containing products for delivery) or can see it sitting in a particular box in the office waiting to get scheduled in the coming weeks.

There's no specific intervals these things are created...it all depends on the 'program' my salesmen create for the customer. One month may have 1 or 2 product deliveries and maybe some service work for a customer, but then nothing for 3 months. Some customers will have product deliveries more frequently throughout the year.

Does that make sense? Thanks for the feedback...

Blake

What we've done is to create new transaction(s) based on series of conditions from the exisiting data.  For example, you could have a series of actions execute in response to an event like a button click.  These actions would evaulate your conditions and if your conditions were met, the action set would then build new sales order(s) and insert them into the database.  This can also be done with any transaction type. 

While the button click kicking off the process the way you describe is not completely automated, I think I see how your solution works...seems easy enough to do.

I seem to remember reading somewhere on these forums that scheduled tasks/functions isn't a feature Method has, yet...am I remembering correctly?

Thanks Mark

Blake

As far as I know there are no action triggering events that occur without someone logging into method.  

To accomplish a completely automatic system you would need to create a separate application that uses Method's API.  This isn't  terribly complicated but does require programming.

That's what I thought. Thanks for the info, Mark.