Streamlining Stock Management

[nig]

With the economic crisis continuing to be a burden on the retail industry our company are striving to lower our administrative overheads.

Actinic is a key area where there is duplication of work to maintain the stock database. We have a centralised stock mangement system which monitors and keeps track of our retail outlets stock. Actinic is manually kept up to date with price changes and removal of product when we no longer sell them.

I've been looking at the back end of actinic and wonder if anybody accesses the MDB directly so as to keep their product prices and stock levels up to date.

I'd be proposing to write a program to extract the necessary data (Ref, price, stock level) out of our stock management system and then directly edit the MDB with the new data. A user would then have to perform a web site update every morning but this would save a significant amount of re-keying data.

Is this is a good idea?

N.

[leehack]

Given Actinic now has real time stock control and for those that stock control is important you're only offering a per day sync, i'm not so sure there is any real benefit to the masses on this. If if course you need to do it anyway that's fine, as you can just offer it to the masses after. People stock controlling is very low in numbers in my experience, wanting to rationalise across channels will be a small sample of an already small sample IMO.

[nig]

Currently e-commerce represents less than 1% of our turnover so as the customer orders are so low, 1 stock update per day would be fine. Initially I'm more interested in price changes and whether the stock is available to purchase. If our main stock system falls to zero then I would set the flag in Actinic to hide the product from the site rather than attempt to maintain an accurate stock level.

It's not my objective to relase anything to the outside world as this development would be designed specifically for my company.

I guess my question is more relating to editing the MDB directly?

[Mike Hughes]

Why edit the dB directly? If you have the product reference, price and stock qty in an excel or access file you can 'import' it directly into Actinic.

Mike

[nig]

To attempt to take as much human interaction out of the loop as possible.

[Mike Hughes]

Is 'File>Import>' going to take much more human interaction than running an external program? I'd be more concerned about trying to access the database at the same time as actinic does.

The other option you could consider is 'linking' to the external data. This way actinic uses the external data when running.

Either way you'll need to run an upload after changing the data to get the website to reflect any price changes.

Mike

[nig]

Is 'File>Import>' going to take much more human interaction than running an external program? I'd be more concerned about trying to access the database at the same time as actinic does.

The other option you could consider is 'linking' to the external data. This way actinic uses the external data when running.

Either way you'll need to run an upload after changing the data to get the website to reflect any price changes.

Mike

I was planning on having the program load the changes in the middle of the night (say 2AM) so as not to cause any conflicts. I know what you mean though about it not taking too much more time to load the changes using the traditional File/Import method and your right, correctly done it would be fine, but I'll be rolling this new procedure out to an administration team so the more streamlined I can get it the less chance of "mistakes" being made.

[Jan]

So long as Actinic is not running on any machines when your program runs it should be fine. You might want to use the batch interface available with Actinic to open up Actinic and upload the site to get the changes to take place online.

If you want to keep it simple, then you could use plugins that are already available to do the scheduling and uploading.

Regards,

[nig]

You might want to use the batch interface available with Actinic to open up Actinic and upload the site to get the changes to take place online.

"Batch Interface" mmmm now that sounds interesting ? Where is that available?

[Duncan Rounding]

Look at the command line switches in the help.

[nig]

Look at the command line switches in the help.

I can see where you can initiate an upload to the site which will be very useful but I wonder if there's any way to automaticaly import data from a flat file?

[Jan]

Hi nig,

No, there isn't.

Regards,

[nig]

Hi nig,

No, there isn't.

Regards,

The command line switches will be useful none the less. I wonder does anybody else directly access the MDB database?

[NormanRouxel]

I wrote a big program that builds a hierarchical import file from the contents of an external EPOS database. The shop owner never touches the Content Tree as everything comes from the import. It's in use on several sites and the shop owner quickly gets proficient at doing File / Import, hitting OK about 10 more times to update the entire site.

These kind of stores usually have a bricks and mortar presence so stock can be depleted in several ways. Using the EPOS system as the master data source means that the web site is as up to date as the last run of the hierarchical update. In practice daily seems to be enough, as the last of something is rarely sold online and by walk-in customers on the same day.

I didn't go the database modification route as that's a much lower level level of interaction than is needed and it's easier to let Actinic build the site using a documented method.

[fergusw]

We have a centralised stock mangement system which monitors and keeps track of our retail outlets stock. Actinic is manually kept up to date with price changes and removal of product when we no longer sell them.

Depending on the data structure of your "centralised stock management" system you might be able to employ Actinic's "External Links" functionality which allows you to map and update fields directly from external data sources such as spreadsheets, databases etc.