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| News from the Kore
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Super Bowl 2003 Issue
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Software Bowl XXXVII Most Valuable
Players
By the smiles on their faces one wouldn't know that the Chargers
didn't make it to the Super Bowl this year. John Bosley, Mark
Dobransky, Eric Yarbrough, Rob Morrison, Andy Blanchard (top, left
to right), Chuck Verran, Paul Trebbien, Paul Bressler, and Ken Dickinson
(bottom, left to right) demonstrate that even when your team doesn't
make it, you can still be glad the Super Bowl is over!
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Tech Tip:
Using SAMPLE and EQ in SELECT and
LIST statements
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By Frank Kertai
fkertai@koretech.com
Managing Partner
Kore Technologies, LLC
SELECT Verb Options
The SELECT verb has some powerful and useful options that
can make life easier when attempting to gather data for analysis. One of these
is the SAMPLE option. When you are developing RETRIEVE reports, it is often
useful to look at sample data to determine such things as field length, column
header descriptions, etc. You can use the SAMPLE option with the SELECT verb to
gather a representative sample of any file. Below is an example of the use of
this option:
| >SELECT
SOLI SAMPLE 5
5 records selected to list 0.
>
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Another useful feature of RETRIEVE is the ability to compare
the contents of different fields of the same record. Below is an example of
this, where we are seeking records where the total ordered quantity EQ the
total open quantity (Note: Unidata users
are required to use the lower case version of the verb – invoking the native
Unidata behavior -- to make this work):
| >list
SOLI WITH F11 EQ
F39 F11 F39
5 records selected to list 0.
08:10:01 JAN 08 2003 1
SOLI...... Total Ordered Quantity Total Open Quantity
187998*2
10 10
201157*1
10 10
201157*2
10 10
201157*3
3 3
201157*4
10 10
183984*2
2 2
Enter <New line> to continue... |
Using SAMPLE AND SAMPLED
On UniData and UniVerse, you can also use SAMPLE with the
LIST or SORT verbs to limit the volume of data reported on. The syntax is the same on both RDBMS systems:
| | SAMPLE [n]
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The first n records from the file are selected and
listed, e.g.
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>LIST PARTS DESC SAMPLE 5
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SAMPLED provides slightly different behavior
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SAMPLED [n]
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Selects every nth record from the file, e.g.
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>LIST PARTS DESC SAMPLED 5
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Note the SORT verb with the SAMPLE (or SAMPLED) command works
the same as always, that is, it selects the records, builds a sorted list, and
then displays the data.
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2002 Results: Kore has Another Successful Year
Despite a tough economic climate for technology
expenditures, Kore was able to grow its revenues and maintain
profitability for the fourth year in a row.
Kore thus keeps up its record of growing every year since its
inception. In addition to
increasing its sales in a year that saw declining revenues on the part of
most technology companies, Kore provided products and services to
twenty-one new customers in 2002. To
all of those companies that took advantage of our products and services
last year, thanks for helping us make this happen!
We look forward with high hopes to 2003!
Of course, if you have been keeping track of the
other changes that have occurred during the year, Kore also added four new
people, moved into new offices, and developed a formal partnership with
Epicor! Not bad, but now on to
better things!
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Advanced Instruments, Inc. Expands Their Web Presence
-- Fast
Norwood, MA –
January 22, 2002
– As a technologically sophisticated company, Advanced
Instruments, Inc. already had an attractive Web presence when they
made the decision to upgrade their Web site to include both a
customer information portal and a Web-based storefront.
Recognizing the strategic value of their Web site, Advanced
Instruments went through an extensive search for the best possible
partner to handle this important project.
After careful consideration they selected Kore Technologies
to work with them to provide the full array of customer service
capabilities offered by Kore’s KommerceServer suite of Web
Applications.
The project officially kicked off on
December 9, 2002
, and today Advanced Instruments is already live, implementing in
less than six weeks from project initiation.
Bob Kelly, IT Director of Advanced Instruments explained,
“Once we have made a decision, Advanced Instruments likes to get
things done, so we put together an aggressive schedule.
We wanted to make sure that our vendor knew we weren’t
going to have a Web project that just dragged on. Kore Technologies
was there to support us every step of the way.”
“It was a pleasure working with Bob Kelly and
his team on this project,” commented Ken Dickinson, Managing
Partner of Kore Technologies. “They
were able to come up to speed quickly on the KommerceServer
technology and together we had the development website up and
running with live data in 2 days. Bob and his team took it from
there and completed the implementation in record time!
We were very pleased that Advanced Instruments took the
opportunity to become another satisfied KommerceServer customer.”
“We knew that we would need a partner that was as dedicated to
our success as we were, if we were going to meet our aggressive schedule.
We are very pleased that we can now provide 24x7 service
to our customers – a nice way to start 2003!”
-- Bob Kelly, IT Director of Advanced
Instruments
About
Advanced Instruments, Inc:
Advanced Instruments is the world's foremost authority for the
application of freezing-point depression (FPD) technology. Additional
technologies have been developed or acquired, making Advanced Instruments a
leading supplier of diagnostic testing systems used by medical and industrial
laboratories world worldwide. See us
at
aicompanies.com..
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Do your customers
see you as a long-term, strategic partner?
A recent article in USA
Today sparked a question that we thought would be useful for
our customers to ask themselves: “Do your customers see you as a long-term
strategic partner?” Why
does an article in USA Today about Web sites spark that question?
Because all of us today who do information-intensive work are
finding ourselves increasingly dependent on the Internet as a fast way of
getting information and taking action, and see it as an integral part of
accommodating a 21st Century work day that is decidedly not 9-5.
I still don’t get it. Simply put,
we want our strategic vendors to be with us for the long haul.
Three years ago Web capabilities were legitimately being sold as a way
of leapfrogging the competition – and an expense that could be avoided.
Today, most of us ended up buying one or more Christmas presents over the Web
last year, and we have increasingly come to see 24x7 self-service ordering,
information access, and customer service as a useful enhancement (typically not
a replacement) to more traditional phone calls and faxes.
When we see a vendor with little or no Web presence, we intrinsically
start to wonder what’s going on with them.
Your vendors are making exactly that same evaluation of you!
Each of our subscribers falls into one of three
categories: (1) they have a Web site that offers their customers all
of the self-service capabilities it makes sense for them to offer on
the Web, (2) they have a limited Web site that offers some
self-service capabilities, or (3) they have a Web site that offers
little or no self-service capabilities, containing only rudimentary
information about their company and products.
If you are in the first group, congratulations!
(Also, we would like to know more about you, and to understand
how you achieved your success. Please
e-mail
me!) If you are
in one of the latter two groups, then are you aware that you can have
a Web site hosted that provides a complete customer information portal
with Storefront capability for less than $3,500 per month?
For some companies decreasing customer service costs pay for
this expense –
800 numbers and the people to answer them are not free!
To find out more simply contact
us. We’ll be
happy to describe the types of capabilities that are now available,
and detail your options. If
you have a need for on-line product configurator, we are especially
interested in talking to you: please contact either Frank
Kertai or Frank
Busalacchi for information about our sales order and
quotation configurator workgroup.
(As you can see, we have cleverly set up this e-mail so that
everyone should contact
us! Please do
so!)
Follow-on
to Last Month’s “Perspective”
Last month in this section
we highlighted the high cost of switching ERP systems.
An interesting article
appeared in a recent ComputerWorld underlining the very points we were
making! We hope these
messages help you appreciate the real value of your “excellent”
(as in “implemented”!) ERP system!
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Since the last newsletter we have
been focused on formulating and defining the forward direction for both Kourier
and KommerceServer.
In particular, for
webTeam
going, going, …
In response to customer feedback,
we are enhancing webTeam’s capabilities for managing requests and workflow.
We expect that this work will position webTeam as an even more attractive
way of managing most of the ad hoc or loosely structured activities in your
company. In the meantime we are
continuing our promotion of webTeam, offering aggressive pricing both to
webTeam as a hosted application, and to webTeam
as an in-house application. We will
continue to offer this pricing until the end of February (Promotional pricing
will not be available with the new version, although people who are on
maintenance with this or prior versions will be entitled to the new version.)
For Kourier
and KommerceServer
expect to see some additional announcements in the
coming months.
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Pauls Corner
 A
little while back, I was driving down the freeway, heading home from
work, and this old pickup truck in front of me had one of those funny
bumper stickers "Horn broken, check for finger". Seems
that little funny can be applied to a lot of things that happen to us
in life. How do you feel when you place a call for help and sit
there on hold for what seems like an eternity? How do you feel
when you purchase a product only to find out the 'bells and whistles'
are all extra (and weren’t included in your price)? I think
something is broken these days. Most of us are patient but we do
have limits. I am just
happy that our Customers rate our services excellent. (See the article
in our Holiday Newsletter.). After
all, great service is always defined by the Customer!
Programmers, let’s speed up processing for the
Inventory folks. Everyday
the Daily Inventory Process is run and updating Inventory Activity is
one of the tasks. The
process selects all stock records that do not have an Activity Flag and
runs them through program MMI.09 to update the numbers in the
INV-SUMMARY file. There is
a set list of Transaction Types that are processed with the other Types
skipped only to be selected the next day and skipped again.
How about if MMI-09 is changed to set the activity flag on all
of those skipped records so they will not be selected and processed
another day? How?
Piece of cake as in most DataFlo versions, the program checks to
see if the Transaction Type is on the list and if not then processing
skips to Label 100 to release the record.
Why not just go to Label 80 which sets the Activity Flag, writes
the Stock record, and then drops on down to Label 100.
Here are those lines of Coding (I eliminated the comments).
My only change was to comment the GO 100 and insert the GO 80
line:
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IF NOT
(INDEX(VALID.TRANS,CHECK.TYPE,1)) THEN
* GO 100
GO 80
END
80 STOCK<20>=1; *Activity Post Flag
Set
CALL
PV.WRITE(‘STOCK’,F.STOCK,ID,0,STOCK,STOCK,‘CHANGEU’)
100 RELEASE F.STOCK,ID
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Please
remember, “Great Service to your Customer is always rewarded”.
Paul’s Questions and Answers
Well,
I have not received much for Questions this time.
Hey, it’s no charge, and I enjoy answering them!
So everyone, if there’s a question you have on how something works,
email it to me – pault@koretech.com.
The third question in this set is a bit challenging, but once you get the
hang of it, I think you’ll like it.
Question: How
can we find the Serial# of UniVerse on the system?
Answer: Logon,
go to TCL, and enter the command: CONFIG. The
serial# is the same as the “License Number” listed on the first line.
Question: The
DataFlo Miscellaneous Inventory Transfers process returns an error message when
the Date is entered. It started at
the first of the year and we cannot set the correct period and year.
How can the set the Period in the Inventory Table?
Answer: You’re
right, when you enter the period in the Inventory Table it picks up the
‘valid’ date range from the Fiscal Year Structure and for Jan 2003 the
correct date range does not exist until after the MGL Year End is run.
Here is a little work around that will fix the problem.
Go to the Fiscal Year Structure, change the Fiscal Year to 2003 and the
date range for Period 1 to 2003, and file the screen.
Go to the Inventory Control Table and change the period to 01.
Go back and change the Fiscal Year Structure back to 2002 and the date
range back to Jan 2002. Now, Misc.
Inventory Transfers screen is happy with Jan 2003 dates.
Question: On
the old PICK Operating System from ADDS when editing records you could create a
“Prestore” command which would perform the editing on your list of records.
Is there anything like that for the UniVerse editor in PICK flavor?
Answer: Yes. (Please be
very careful editing records.) Here’s
how to setup and perform a PreStore command in Universe:
- Select
the list of records.
- Edit
the first record performing the changes
(Note, Universe is keeping track of
every command in it’s Editor Stack
- Save
the list of commands using the .S
command, give the save command a name and which lines you wish to save (use
.L to view)
Example:
.S PAUL 1,5
- Using
XEQ, edit your list of
commands. While still in the
editor add a LOOP command as the last command in the list.
This loop command needs to know how many times to perform the list of
commands, i.e. from 1 to 999. This
command will look something like LOOP 1
999.
- Execute
your list of commands (the Pre-Store command) using .X,
for example .X PAUL
Here’s an example. Say I wish to create 3 new records in
a file with ID’s 1, 2, and 3, insert “Hi” in attribute, and then filed the
record.
>SELECT TRANS-TYPE '1' '2' '3'
3 record(s) selected to SELECT list #0.
>>ED TEMP-PAUL
SELECTed record name = "1".
New record.
----: I Hi
0001: Hi
Bottom at line 1.
----: FI
"1" filed in file "TEMP-PAUL".
SELECTed record name = "2".
New record.
----: .L
02 I Hi
01 FI
Top.
----: .S PAUL 1,2
Saved "PAUL" in file "&ED&".
Top.
----: XEQ ED &ED& PAUL
Executing the command "ED &ED& PAUL".
3 lines long.
----: P
0001: EPre-stored Command saved at 10:06:38
08 JAN 2003
0002: I Hi
0003: FI
Bottom at line 3.
----: I LOOP 1 999
0004: LOOP 1 999
Bottom at line 4.
----: FI
"PAUL" filed in file "&ED&".
---------- Returned to the EDITOR from the XEQ command.
Top.
----: .X PAUL
0001: Hi
"2" filed in file "TEMP-PAUL".
SELECTed record name = "3".
New record.
0001: Hi
"3" filed in file "TEMP-PAUL".
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April
6-8, 2003 – Forum 2003, Las Vegas, NV
Kore will once again be participating in this
year’s Epicor User Group event, “Forum 2003”. We will be participating in
the vendor area, and also plan on speaking on a topic of general usefulness to
everyone. We will also be looking forward to seeing all of our friends in
the Epicor community again. Plan on being there – it will be both
useful and fun.
See www.Epicorusers.org
for more information.
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If you have any questions or comments on our
newletter please contact
Frank Busalacchi.
We're here to help!
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