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"Sales Ticker"
My mission should I pull it off: find away for multiple users to see and edit sales/ inventory quantitys in real time. (Envision all the screens at the NY stock exchange but smaller)
Current Ideas:
Shared desktop/ application shareing (multiple people connected to same spread sheet concuremtnly) looks like a dedicated "desktop" will be required given what I have seen form the solutions bellow:
MS Live meeting (kind of what I want can it be done with out goin out side my firewalls? at what cost?)
MS Share point (near real time, mearly a collaboration tool)
Net Meeting (same as live meeting, but i got it to work internaly, but its to complecated for the users)
VNC (would only allow one connection at a time, how to enable multiple views of same session?)
I had/am conssidering:
RSS web page but how to update from the web page without coding the entire app? (can i even do this to a file?)
Lotus notes application shareing
a VB front end to a spread sheet or Access database file?
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that would be good it this were retail, and I did not have a bunch of exisitng managment information systems involved here. I need an enterprize level solution here to provide "data" on multiple aspects of multiple systems.
One would assume that any one of these would be able to do this, but they dont all talk to each other, nor do they have all the information regarding that aspect of the buisness (this is why we are moving to SAP which after all the politics is done may run everything)
The sales department currently uses multiple sources of data to create a spread sheet which is distributed to customers containing current inventory, forcasts and projectsions. this information is ussualy ommiting certain aspects (the exact inventory) so that customers will not buy all of our stock while the market is looking up (prices can move by $100 a day/unit so we dont want to get cleaned out early on in a good day).
on a busy day the sales department will simply record the orders quanity/quality/price/customer sold to. at the end of business theis will then be mass entered into the managment systems. this keeps sales moving along with out having to wait for the order to be entered.
This means that all the sales reps must have a method to reference the current inventory levels in real time. If its not in real time we will over sell. The problem with off the shelf is the nature of our product (lumber), ability to forcast, and Inventory controls.
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Something web-based with data syncronized from your ERP system maybe?
If all you need is a spreadsheet-type of app then someone could code a webpage to pull information from a database and perform transactions in real-time. I have done something like this (live work-in-progress reports and due jobs - well, almost live, few minutes delay) using mysql as a local database and php to generate pages and perform queries to our ERP system.
