Objective:
Developing SFA (Sales Force Automation) system for automation of wholesale firm interaction with remote customers.
Solution:
We created a program that is installed by a customer and allows interaction with wholesale firm through FTP server of this firm, supporting Dial-Up modem connections.
Platforms, Tools and Technologies
The application was developed using Borland C++Builder 6 with using STL and Win32 API functionality. The application can work on Windows 95/98/ME/NT/2000/XP platform. FTP server may be on any platform, including: Linux, NetWare, Windows 2000 Server etc.
General program's abilities:
- Automatic renewal of product price - list from wholesale firm FTP server . Comparison of old and new price - lists is fulfilled in order to determine new products and products with changed prices .
- Price-list review, products sorting, searching and filtration in off-line regime.
- Creation and editing orders for purchasing products in price-list body in off-line regime. Composed order can be also reviewed and edited in a separate table.
- Keeping archive of prepared, suspended, sent and accepted orders. Drag & drop regime is supported in the tree of order archive, there also are options of periodical automatic archive cleaning from out-of-date orders. Prepared order can be returned to the price-list for updating. Order composed in the price-list body is saved at program reboot or supply failure.
- Order sending, renewal of sent orders status (feedback), mail exchange with a customer.
- Price-list and orders export to other systems (including MS Excel).
- Document printing, including: price-list. Orders , invoices , bills , etc .
- Automatic renewal of program and program configuration ini - files .
- Dial-Up modem connection support, including: standard abilities of telephone directory keeping, automatic cyclic dialing a number, etc.
Program benefits:
- Advanced, developed in details, intuitively comprehensive, easy-to-use user interface.
- CSV text files based local database. Additional BDE, ADO , etc. installation is not required. Database files can be easily edited and viewed also in any text editor or MS Excel.
- Easy installation procedure. Program distributive consists of a single small file, setup.exe.
- Program can work on the very old and slow computers, under Windows 95, with screen definition of 800x600 and 256 colors.
- Program can work on the very slow communication lines, including with using modems. For this all sent data are archived in ZIP format. Procedure of receiving files from FTP server supports resume mode, restarting interrupted file transmission.
- Program has failure-resistant, reliable , proven and effective procedure of data exchange with FTP server .
- Program allows exporting selected data to CSV files and MS Excel.
- Support of an opportunity of simultaneous work with two FTP servers: internal (local) firm's FTP server, where Dial-Up server is also installed and external one, located in Internet area.
- Many program configurations (such as addresses, login, password and both FTP servers' paths) can be changed remotely by automatic renewal of ini-files from FTP server of wholesale firm.
- Each customer is assigned with a personal code and code of a group. This allows, for example, placing different price-lists for different customers' groups.
- Program is simple in server (FTP) part maintenance.
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