The client used an ERP System for all their sales orders, but the way it was designed allowed copies of identical products within the same order to have different prices.

This led to inconsistencies, and made bulk changes very time consuming (an order could contain 1000’s of part, and these were nested under different sections, which all had to be checked).

We designed a small application which:

• Queries the sales order and groups similar items together.
• Lets the user update fields and write those back to the ERP.
• Lets the user merge parts that should be identical.

Parts of image blurred for privacy.

This was an extremely simple program for us to build (we even threw in a reusable template system to make it even slicker) yet it saved the client a substantial amount of time and money.

Although this functionality would have ideally been added to the ERP system, the ERP was nearing the end of its life, plus we were able to build the funtionality for much less.

The reason it often costs us less is that we are using more agile tools and processes than those used to build ERP systems.

Take home points:

• While building into the ERP is usually preferrable for ease of access and consistency of user experience, sometimes there is more mileage in using an external tool.
• For functionality that isn’t user accessible (such as nightly data transfers) then you should definitely consider using a third party to develop the functionality.