Stock Control (again)

[Jan]

But in order to run this automatically for overnight order processing you need to pay £200

No you don't, all processing relating to stock control is included in the stock control mole module which sells for £59.99, this processing is basically order download, catalog upload, the scheduler, the overnight upload feature and the option to set max quantity to number in stock.

Regards,

[Howard Walker]

I have found another problem with stock when working orders from one machine and managing the catalogue from another.
The stock reports generated on the order-processing machine do not represent the actual stock that is on line. For example, if a product is shown as out of stock on the web page, one would expect the report 'Stock Levels - Orders suspended' to show that product. It does not.
It also applies to the report 'Stock Levels' - Stock Warning given'. This applies even after a download, so the order-processing machine has no hope at all of knowing whether any thing is in stock or not.

There is little chance at all of controlling stock manually in this situation. Others who were tempted by the stated feature that you can manage the catalogue from one location and process the orders from another need to think twice.

Unless anyone else has a solution?

[m@rk.to]

i too have had this problem and it has been quite infuriating when we oversell over a weekend by example. actinic is a wonderful product and has got us to where we are now, but i think we may have outgrown the features of the product, perhaps?

even considering the dos issue outlined by nadeem, we need to be considering a realtime server solution rather than an offline actinic solution that gives us full stock control. from a customer's point of view, it is very difficult to overcome their annoyance when we oversell and cannot answer their question of "well, why did you accept my order". in essence, the customer has put their trust in us and we have let them down.

there are some other requirements that actinic does not seem to allow, such as multiple user order processing from multiple machines due to this stock monitor complication. i have a previous post somewhere talking about this and i am sorry, but £8,000 for a six user license for a network edition of sage line 50 is not only overkill, but not the right answer.

one other frustration and one for the wish list would be the ability to archive off orders. this week we passed our 20,000th order and it was all getting a little clunky trying to open and process orders on a daily basis, though i have recently found a workaround, albeit not ideal.

imho, actinic is a fantastic and wonderful solution and i would recommend it to others to get them off the ground in this online world. it would be fair to say that it has got us to where we are now, though perhaps we have simply outgrown it's features? indeed, when speaking to one gentleman in sales towards the end of last year, he too concluded that we would now *not* be considered as the targeted audience.

i digress for a moment but in a similar vein, i know some of our competitors trade online with products that our oos with our supplier. they take customer orders and then procure from suppliers and will try to recommend something else if the supplier is oos. their administration overhead must be horrendous, let alone with the customer dis-satisfaction. i do not know whether this *is* because of poor business acumen or because of limitations of their software application? i can understand the just in time principle, but this is misleading customers is giving a bad reputation in our space. because of this, it is my goal for both our office administration and the customer experience to manage our online stocks proactively. we need to manage customer expectation and promote online commerce, not let customers down because of poor and inadequate stock control.

in summary, i for one certainly see stock control rather than stock management being a pre-requisite of any software solution and would certainly suggest actinic look at these business needs, supply the solution and allow us the user to analyse the risk of a dos over proper stock control by example. we have a recommendation for a solution with a rather large price tag over and above sage line 50, but it will give us this true stock management and multiple user order processing and a range of other requirements. we are now in the roi stage and will need to be making a decision soon. we do not wish to move away from actinic, but this stock control issue and multiple user order processing is a key driver.

there's my two pennies and perhaps a little rant, but i hope that the developers will take my comments as come constructive feedback .

[cdicken]

Hi Mark

Thank you for your feedback.

You have had all the advice that we, as a team, can give so there's nothing I can really add to it here.

All I can really add is that Actinic Business in the next major release will have much better handling of large volumes of orders (i.e. it will not cache the entire list of orders in order to just display one - you can get it to only cache, say, the previous month's orders).

[m@rk.to]

hi chris,

is there an eta for this new major release?

kind regards,
mark

[cdicken]

No - we will not be announcing a date until we know absolutely that it will be a definite date.

[fife]

I am so disappointed that I cannot monitor Stock properly. We have 1 computer that uploads all design and product info, and another computer that downloads all the orders. Why is it that the computer that downloads orders does NOT modify stock quantities? Can this be changed!?

This is goofy!

[cdicken]

I am so disappointed that I cannot monitor Stock properly. We have 1 computer that uploads all design and product info, and another computer that downloads all the orders. Why is it that the computer that downloads orders does NOT modify stock quantities? Can this be changed!?

Are both machines on the same network? If so, you could consider using Actinic Business and then using the 'External Linking' feature to link your upload and download machine to the same Excel spreadsheet which can contain your stock values. The download machine will update the spreadsheet with the new numbers, and then the upload machine will take the new stock levels from the spreadsheet.

[Howard Walker]

I am so disappointed that I cannot monitor Stock properly. We have 1 computer that uploads all design and product info, and another computer that downloads all the orders. Why is it that the computer that downloads orders does NOT modify stock quantities? Can this be changed!?

This is goofy!

After 500 orders experience, we have decided that it is a good thing not to have stock control on the shop. We also stopped using a credit card collection agency. This gives us total freedom, with no worries about orders being paid for and with no stock in hand. If we run out of stock, we hide the product on the web site until new stock comes. If we get caught out, we ring up the customer and advise him as soon as possible. So far we have had no problems. There is a little more work involved, but the freedom to run our business how we want to, rather than be ruled by the program, is well worth it.