Enterprise-level ERP system

Warehouse Minder is a universal accounting system for enterprises and medium size businesses, that belongs to *Minder products family. This system is a property of an Australian company “Barcoding & Data Collection Systems Pty Limited” (http://www.barcoding.com.au). System allows real-time accounting, storing and moving of products in warehouses. Almost the whole system is designed to operate with barcode scanners - log in and log out from the system, operating with most of screens of the system, activation some of business processes in system etc. Minder is integrated with very powerful ERP NetSuite and allows data exchange in real time tracking incoming and outgoing warehouse product units. Update system can work both in automatic and in on-demand (manual) mode. System is designed with requirement to work on PC and different PDAs/HandHelds and to be platform-independent.

Among other Minder’s advantages one of most important is that it allows to work in off-line mode. User doesn’t feel the difference, but all his on-screen actions are stored in internal database and all of them are applied as soon as System Administrator turns on internet connection. Minder’ clients like this options since they feel more comfortable when they open internet gates for server only few times per day and only when it’s required – this helps them to decrease external access to their local network as much as possible. It’s also good to know that Minder won’t send tons of unnecessary bytes trough internet and will only make synchronizing of recently changed records.

Such well-known not only in Australia brands like Shell (http://www.shell.com/home/content/au-en/welcome.html) and Volkswagen are enjoying using of Minder system. Average-size companies like Alstom Power (http://www.power.alstom.com), Fresh Produce Group (http://www.freshproducegroup.com/), National Museum of Australia (www.nma.gov.au) operate with Minder system in their everyday work as well. It’s also interesting to know that few Police departments in Australia are using Minder to store information about dangerous stuff.

 Key Features

Challenge:
Since the system is very big and complex and the expectations of the multinational clients are very high, during the development our team faced and successfully resolved quite a lot of challenging issues, among which are the following:
• On connection to ERP NetSuite, there appeared a problem with odd sending of data via SOAP. This problem was solved by writing a class for caching and checking data sent and received by the system. This significantly decreased the volume of traffic transferred by the system. Using this class system got ability to select which data is needed to be updated and which is not and to load data by discrete portions, if needed.
• There also appeared a task to develop several intellectual screens, which would be completely controlled via a barcode scanner, would recognize scanned data and put them to correct form fields, and which would also recognize user errors and promptly inform user about them. The task was also to make all processes handled by screens – saving data, running transactions, changing to other screens – be controlled without using keyboard and/or mouse but only via barcode scanner. This task was particularly important due to the fact that in most cases users of these screens are in about 10 meters from actual terminal and using wireless (Bluetooth) barcode scanners, so they shouldn’t waste time to get to terminal and make appropriate actions.
• Developing Minder classes that allows user to work in off-line mode was a big challenge for our team as well. We made a deep analysis of the existing up-to-date solutions for storing on-screen user actions history in special database and have chosen to use some of Google technologies to get a stable solution with many powerful features, which we successfully integrated.
Features:
• Accounting on several warehouses;
• Accounting on several locations inside warehouse;
• Listing of suppliers/consumers;
• Reports system;
• Accessibility from PC and PDA;
• Integration with mobile and fixed barcode scanners;
• Generation of own barcodes.

Technologies:

Technologies: 
- PHP5, 
- AJAX, 
- SOAP
3rd party libraries, frameworks and classes: 
- Zend Framework 1.5, 
- JQuery 1.2, 
- GoogleGears, 
- Flex, 
- JPGraph 1.26, 
- FPDF 1.6, 
- PEAR, 
- JQueryUI library, 
- NetSuite library.  
Database: 
- FireBird 2.1, 
- SQLite