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Good morning SO people,
First a bit of general information:
I work in a warehouse with goods we manage with a WMS system which I operate. This program is on a VPN thats hosted in Switserland while i'm in Holland.
I get also orders in this program through an EDI. I gather groups of orders together to create a full truck. After that they are picked by the warehouse. and stored until it's ready to be loaded.
As the WMS program is just as stated a WMS program and not designed to have an overview of which good are ready to be loaded with which reference at which dock etc, we've created an excel 2010 table which has the following information:
Customer, Truck destination, dock loading, time to be ready, time ready, truck name, additional info, number of colli, Picked today?, load today?, wms groep number and scan-out list.
The above information is entered in the table for each truck and we keep an excelfile for each week which has 7 sheets for each day. I keep track each day what we have picked that day and which have been loaded or not. Because of preformance tracking, this needs to be almost perfect. If an order has been picked today the "picked today?"-flag will be set, and if it has been loaded than the "loaded today"-flag will be set. If the goods are picked, but not loaded that day, that row will be copied to the next day with the "Picked today?"-flag set to false.
In this manner we have an overview what goods needs to be picked and which are still waiting to be loaded. So that we dont loose track of any goods
I now this is a lot of information, but I believe this helps in solving my problem.
The problem is as follows:
I'm not the only one in this excel sheet. Each day around 6 people have this file open to either actively edit and save very often (like me and my colleague) or the truck planner who check regularly how far we are. They only do saves
As such we have the file open in "Shared"-mode which you all know is bugged. We get a lot of "File in use"" errors when saving.
Also, searching for a list of trucks to one destination in this manner can't be done, since there are multiple excel files. We can track day to day, but thats about it.
Also preformance over a period is out of the question. Or we have to keep track of the performance per week in a extra excelfile.
So my question now is:
Do you guys know any program out there which can do all this, or otherwise has most of the same functionality. Which stores all data in the same database. Also multiuser functionality and per user read-only access would be a nice addition.
Also Office 365 Co-authoring is not an option. My internet through the VPN isn't very fast and the cells need to be editted fast to keep the warehouse process from stopping (Time is money etc)
I do have experience with programming in Delphi, so I could in theorie create my own databse program (After a year of programming), but why re-invent the wheel, right ?
Thank you very much for reading this long tekst, and I hope someone can help me.
And if you have any questions or need clarification, feel free to ask
Your question will probably be closed since this is not a programming question. (See What can I ask about here?), but an easy answer based on the requirements (basic, typical database functionality) and the fact that this is a programming site:
Microsoft Access can do everything you want.
If co-authoring is a problem then don't co-author or improve your network connection, or else any database's performance will be impacted.
Related
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Just found about this new regulation, it will be law in 2018 and affects anybody who stores data about EU citizens, that can be used to identify a person. More detail here.
I have a page that doesn't store names and exact addresses but it stores birth dates and country/city as location and uses these two to provide a service (which is the core service, so I can't just stop collecting these data).
From what I understand I have to take some action to ensure compliance with GDPR, but I haven't found reasonable explanations what that means. There is a dozen articles that rephrase paragraphs of GDPR, that is not helping at all.
I don't mind full deletion, explaing what data I store to the users and simmilar points ... What I am mostly worried about is the part about anonymizing data so in case of a breach they can not be used to identify a person. How am I supposed to do that? If I store an email address used to verify an user account and tie birth date and location data via PK to that verified email, they are no longer anonymous ... and they can't be, right?
Any thought about practical solutions to become GDPR compliant?
Ultimately, in the UK, the GDPR will be enforced by the ICO - Information Commissioners Office. Whilst some of the regulation is quite clear cut, the articles relating to anonymisation are open to interpretation and we'll probably only fully understand how the line is drawn once the ICO has enforced a case relating to it. Having said that there is a bunch of good info on their site.
Their is also a group of academics in the UK advising both the ICO and businesses (for free) about anonymisation. They're called the UK Anonymisation Network - UKAN. I've had a web meeting with them - they're awesome.
It is unlikely you will have to anonymise your data if you use standard encryption to store your data at rest. Anonymisation may come in handy if you are sharing any of that data with third parties. In the event of a breach on their system, you can demonstrate you have taken as many steps as possible to mitigate your risk.
I agree with the above - GDPR is a great thing for privacy rights and data control - I also agree that there are a million sites out there just rephrasing gdpr!
In terms of practical steps, more guidance is going to be released by the ICO this month. But it makes sense to begin by mapping out what user data you process, whether the reasons for this are justified and whether there you have asked for EXPLICIT permission to use that data in that way. Further to this you should think about how you can delete data if it's requested.
There are services that will keep independent record of opt ins and alert you to data vulnerabilities. Anonomisation works in some cases, in others, if you have permission, then all you need is process to delete and an audit trail.
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Most of you certainly use some kind of bugtracker. Maybe internally only, once a customer files a bug via email or phone you add a new ticket by yourself. Sometimes weekly project meetings can be great source of new tickets coming preferably in flavors of excel sheets that the PM on the other side of the table loves to maintain and chase after you.
The more advanced (and transparent) version: Allow the customer to file (and see the progress of) his bugs directly into you bugtracker. Systems like JIRA allow you to use profiles to have certain access rights, etc.
But now the question: The bug raised by a user not necessary translates into 1 bug in a specific module/method/EJB/class. The version of the (your) web application he uses does not translate into the version of the class that is causing the error. How you maintain the internal part of the ticket with all the nasty techy details and the same time the make-the-user-feel-good ticket (need more info, accepted, in progress,..) ? Creating 2 tickets for internal and external ? Link them ?
Any smart recipes to share ?
Separate your bug system from your customer support tracking system, and allow links between them.
Bugs can refer to zero, one or more customer support tickets.
Customer support tickets may refer to zero bugs (e.g. the customer's problem has nothing to do with your software), one bug (in case it's really a problem in your software) or more than one bug (shit happens).
Make queries like:
Which customers are waiting for a solution of bug X
Which customers are waiting on open critical bugs
Which bugs were already encountered by user Y
...
You will also notice that each database will have its own 'speed'. In my situation I have about 4 times more customer support calls than real bugs.
Most sensible way is to have two systems, or an alterantive mechanism for end users to submit bugs (via email). The main problem is not so much that a bug not necessarily translates into one method in a class, but mostly that if you have more than a handfull of users, peopel wont read existing bugs and think further than "button does not work".
If you isolate the real incident system (make it public, but read only), your staff can screen incoming bugs, make sur ethey are reproducable and have repro cases, check against existin bugs and in general have a clear bug once you enter it, and not soe hard to understand mess that may or may not ven make sense and be yet another entry of the same bug entered another 30 times already.
Each comment in JIRA has a "Viewable By" field that allows you to set the Group or Project Role to whom the comment is visible. You could use that to hide the "nasty techy details".
Alternatively you're probably on the right track when you say create two issues and link them. This has the added benefit of hiding your internal workflow from the customer.
One system for both (external) Help Desk and (internal) Issue Tracking. As long as you have complete control over visibility of tickets/issues, and can link between external/internal items, then this is no big deal.
Read more:
http://countersoft.com/downloads/whitepapers/Implementing_an_Issue_Management_Platform.pdf
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We are trying to implement SCRUM with the Microsoft SharePoint Online. Although we can use tasks and issue tracker to suit SPRINTS and iterations and system testing, we are using an excel speadsheet to produce the burndown chart. However, we have to extract all the tasks first, reformat the data, the feed in the chart values. Does anyone have a quicker way?
We use SharePoint custom lists to help us implement scrum. It's far from perfect, but allows for a lot of flexibility.
What we do is extend the tasks list to include a sprint number (really a lookup to another list), product backlog (another lookup), estimated effort, and estimated time to complete columns (ETC-01 through ETC-10 - we do one or two week sprints). We also have a field to flag whether the row is capacity data or not (one of these rows per sprint per person).
Then we have several views, but one primary view which shows a grouping by "is capacity data" followed by "assigned to". We also total those ETC values. So our summary view can give us a quick look at the total for the team for both capacity and estimated time to complete for any day in the sprint. We currently manually put this in Excel, but have considered automation as well. We have another view that is a datasheet view used for data entry. Almost all of our views have a master-child page where you choose the sprint master to view the sprint backlog details.
So, all of that sounds rough, but it's pretty easy to use once you get the hang of it.
The benefit is that we have a lot of flexibility when we need it. For example, our Product Backlog list may have custom columns depending on the project.
We have used 3rd party tools before, but for us it gets a little difficult because we are a consulting company and our clients interact with these tools as well.
G'day,
I can't really comment on the SharePoint aspects as I'm a *nix guy. I thought I'd mention that you should be referring to it as Scrum. It's not an acronym but taken from a word that refers to a part of the game of rugby where everyone binds together and each team member has a particular job to do. So the convention is to refer to it as Scrum.
There are lots of excellent, free tools out there to assist with sorting out your burndown charts rather than just chewing raw Excel data.
BTW Good luck with the SharePoint bits. (-:
Edit: Actually, while looking for a couple of tools I stumbled across the 21 Apps site which specialises in Agile SharePoint solutions. Some interesting looking stuff there.
If you are not constrained by Sharepoint, there are plenty of free and locally installable tools that would simplify your life a great deal.
Example: http://github.com/friflaj/ajellito
Apologies for the blatent plug - we found the same problem with not having a great user experience of doing Scrum in SharePoint - lists are good but nothing really gave the easy to use as a whiteboard experience.
I have used other tools like VersionOne - but really find that add to many features and just get over complicated for most teams to get into.
We create a Scrum for SharePoint solution: 21Scrum
Note: This is only availble for SharePoint 2010 as we have built it to work in the Sandbox for easy deployment.
Andrew
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So Amazon has lots of different APIs for different things, and it's hard to find the one I'm looking for.
I have a client that sells things and checks Amazon's lowest price to know where to price their things (slightly under the lowest thing there). They want functionality integrated into their inventory system that would automatically find the product's lowest price on Amazon and display that. I was wondering which AWS service is best suited to this task.
I see the Product Advertising API, and that looks like the closest thing right now. Is that so?
I don't really want to rely on a scraper when Amazon provides a programmatic interface to this information somewhere, which I know they do because many other products have this. Some say that they can just download a dump of Amazon's products and use that locally -- I'm open to that option too if anyone can point me in its direction.
Yes, the technically appropriate API is the Product Advertising API, using the ItemLookup/ItemSearch operations or the Seller* operations.
https://affiliate-program.amazon.com/gp/advertising/api/detail/main.html
I would also advise you to check the licensing agreement for this API, notably clause 4 (i).
You can use the Amazon Marketplace Web Service (api, description)
This service can group all of the available offers into ‘buckets’ and shows the lowest price from each bucket bucket.
Each bucket has a unique combination of:
Sub-Condition (New, Like New, Very Good, Good, Acceptable)
FulfillmentChannel (FBA or Merchant-Fulfilled)
ShipsDomestically (True, False, Unknown)
ShippingTime (0-2 days, 3-7 days, 8-13 days, 14 or more days)
SellerPositiveFeedbackRating (98-100%, 95-97%, 90-94%, 80-89%,
70-79%, Less than 70%, Just launched)
Someone made a really cool demo of the API here
We cannot get the entire amazon products using API.They had made certain restrictions to the usage of API such that it would be more relevant to advertising use case only.
I wrote that small python module to achieve such a task: https://github.com/iMilnb/awstools/blob/master/mods/awsprice.py
Basically, it fetches the prices from Amazon's website and convert them to a nice and parsable python dict.
I wrote two example functions that show how to use the resulting dict to dump an instance price on various terms along with a CSV converter.
There is a reply to a similar question which lists all the .js files containing the prices, which are barely JSON files (with only a callback(...); statement to remove).
Here is an exemple for Linux On Demand prices : http://aws-assets-pricing-prod.s3.amazonaws.com/pricing/ec2/linux-od.js
(Get the full list directly on that reply)
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Joel often talks about using MS Excel for lightweight project management, but I'm curious about actual implementations of this idea. I've seen some templates that seem to clone MS Project via macros, which would be overkill for a lightweight project. Anyone have any useful templates?
try
feature task estimated hours actual hours current %
---------- ---------- --------------- ------------ ---------
if estimated hours times current % is greater than actual hours, you are behind schedule
update the actual hours and current % on a daily basis
see also joel's old excel template
Maybe a bit off-topic, but you might want to consider testing Google Docs. There is a Gantt chart widget provided by Viewpath in the "Insert->Widget..." menu option.
You have some pretty advance template with Pipetalk Scheduler
alt text http://ep.yimg.com/ip/I/pipetalk_2055_216386
However, since it seems to be a little too much, I just transfered that to the worst UI thread ;)
Edward Tufte - aka "the man" when it comes to data representation has done a lot of work on Gantt charts (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gantt_chart) has some good information on this topic, but basically it boils down to using Excel as a Gantt chart creator, the advantage being that it's simple and won't get in your way much:
http://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=000076
It's not excel, but I saw scrumy and liked it's demo. For a small project recently, I just generated a project plan using 'Cross Functional Flowchart' under Business Process with some flow/process stuff in Visio.
You could consider using a Sprint Backlog. You estimate the time for every tasks of your project and your update the estimated remaining time every day or so. Then you have a burndown chart that shows the remaining effort to complete the project.
If your project is too large for a daily tracking, you could either do the tracking every week, or manage a product backlog of the things to be done in your project as a coarse-grained level of planning and then choose the most prioritized one for the finer-grained planning level.
You might want to look at Scrum(1) or any other agile methods for lightweight development methods for further details.
(1) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrum_(development)
If you like using spreadsheets and not getting involved with too many fancy tools, have a look at The One Page Project Manager - it's exactly as described, a nice, lightweight way to keep track of all your important project info on a single worksheet.
Much simpler: some Gantt graph in Excel ,as illustrated here.
The columns I use are
1) Task Name
2) Budget Hours
3) Total Hours
4) Remaining Hours
The Key is column (4). Rather than getting the person to estimate a percent complete; get them to re-estimate from this point forward. Its a subtle change but the mindset is much different. Otherwise you almost always end up stuck at 90% complete.
There are a lot of useful template in this page. Also, you can read more in our project management software blog.
Hope it helps :)
I use EasyProjectPlan which is an Excel Project Plan that syncs with Outlook and MSProject.
www.EasyProjectPlan.com
I use the Outlook and Calendar sync features to distribute and collect task information to my team members.
I distribute the EPP Excel file to all team members either by email or I post it in a shared folder.
My team members can edit the EPP excel file and send the changes back to me.
Most of the companies I work for have no PM task management system so EPP allows me to walk onto any project and immediately distribute and collect task information to all team members. Considering that most companies use Excel and Outlook, there is nothing to install on any computer.
In my experience, team members prefer to view task information in Excel and Outlook.