Re: PostgreSQL as an application server

ned@nedscape.com (Ned Lilly) wrote in message news:<4113AB0A.5020903@nedscape.com>...
> Jonathan,
> 
> This is exactly how my company has built a very robust ERP application.  See www.openmfg.com.
> 
Hi Mr. Lilly:

I not sure who to address this question to at your company. 

I'm a valued added reseller who combines a dozen plus products, CAD
engineering and project management to serve a construction niche
market. Probably a third of our dollar purchases go to our primary
OEM. Though they are vital to us we are probably less than 5% of their
sales.

Back in March 2003 I lobbied (e-mailed .pdf files and web URLs; made
calls, followed up) both the company president and the general manager
of that OEM to consider OpenMFG in lieu of a MRP system proposed by a
Michigan based Microsoft "partner". Last week the general manager
mentioned in passing that she was going back to the office this
weekend to begin learning their new OpenMFG software. [ Hummm. I wish
we were in "the loop" more. :>) ]

Our micro business also wants to update its accounting, sales and
project management software/processes. Even SOHO businesses like
ourselves dispair of order entry and vendor acknowledgements via a
stream of faxes. As an on-going buyer from your OpemMFG customer how
can we can easily upload/download purchase orders and receive back
acknowledgements? From a transaction processing standpoint faxes are
utterly "brain dead". E-mailing Excel files is marginally better but
still very labor intensive, error prone and not easily manipulated or
indexed.

This next week we will contract with a free lance programmer/analyst
to update our Access '97 VBA based accounting software to an Access
2003 front end and a SQL Server 2005 Express backend (ODBC links).
This involves upsizing our static customer, vendor, project and job
related revenue and cost transaction data to a format we can
manipulate in Access 2003 or independently.

Does your "Sales Order Management" have some kind of file related
batch processing that would allow us to e-mail orders to our OEM (your
OpenMFG customer)? This OEM says they only need occassional dial-up
for internet access so web portal data entry is not an option. That's
OK. I prefer not to rekey orders on our end anyway.

Presently our faxed orders to this OEM are 1-5 pages of bone wearying
detail printed from Excel spreadsheets. The detail comes from macros
acting on "lookup" Excel worksheets, reformated and with quantities
added, extended and totaled. The "lookup" Excel worksheets are created
from this OEM's product-price schedules faxed to us, OCR'd, edited and
copied to Excel.

Is there any way our OEM can grab a snap shot of the pertinent tables
from your OpenMFG product PostgreSQL database, export them (file
format?) and e-mail to us? Then we could revised our Excel quotation
spreadsheets to "lookup"
product/price/description/weight/dimensions/cubes/notations from SQL
tables (via ODBC, OLE.DB or 3rd party software). If we get the job and
the quote becomes an order we could then sort product line-items by
OEM, copy/paste to Access 2003 and (hopefully) export to whatever file
format will batch process back into OpenMFG's "Sales Order Management"
module.

For what it may be worth we've already started on the XSL/XSLT
learning curve with Altova's XMLSPY 2004 Professional Edition. Though
XML is intended for machine to machine interaction we use XML to keep
track of sheets of different sizes and hundreds of "off cut" parts.
XML is the native import/export format for the panel nesting program
we use. We've gotten familar with cutting and pasting the XML data
file. Does this have application?  See especially
http://www.altova.com/whatsnew.html#db .

I'm probably being simplistic above. Hey, a micro/SOHO distributor can
dream, can't they?  How far through does OpenMFG (or related software)
followed the "food chain" downstream?

Thank you in advance for your thoughts (or referral within your
company to whoever can assist us).

Alanzo Manton