Hi everybody, Dave here…
No… It’s not time for Dave to take a vacation. It’s not time for some chillin’ listening to all those new CD’s I just bought at Vintage Vinyl.
I aint got time for that.
My brain is THE data blender these days.
Often I stop, consider what I’m doing, and am downright amazed. Then I realize the two systems that I’m working with, I sigh. And that when it really hits me. My brain is quickly becoming mush.
Man, could I use a vacation.
We have this tool called RB. It is our job tracking system. It is painfully bad, and works only 55% of the time. Plus its’ more than 5 years old.
I dont if any of you realize that a system that old CANT possibly be any good…
Well, for me its not really that. What is really scary is that you sit down with our end users, and really talk to them about how much time it takes them to get work done, and the number of workarounds they have to use to do simple stuff, and … well … RB just doesn’t cut it.
So that’s my data source. For you accounting types. RB is simple enough that it creates an invoice THE MOMENT you create a JOB! How’s that grab you in the invoice numbering department eh?
Let me just get this off my chest: I am so glad that I know nothing about accounting. If I did… I’d be much worse than I am now.
So, the goal was to take data out of RB, and create records in Great Plains. Well, one thing led to anohter, and I started to learn DTS in some detail. I have to admit that I’m still a novice, but I’m starting to understand how the workflows fit together.
So, now we have a DTS package that does inserts and updates, plus it generates an audit trail, that is accessible via a web page on our intranet. Thanks to some other code I’ve written - displaylist.asp Dave’s general purpose datalister…
Anyway, so we now synch jobs, salespoeple and customers in about 5 minutes everynight. So the accountant comes in in the morning, and validates the nights feed via the audit web page…
When we tried to use this technique to import Invoices, it was a totally different story.
More on this later. Thanks for listening.
Dave
