May 5, 2010 - Update

Happy Mothers day - and to make it even more special - here are a few updates.

1. Cursor will now default to the Search textbox on the Families page.

This was a feature request to speed up data entry.

2. Product Order on Load Sheet

Load Sheet is now in Product Order. Product Order is user defined so you can customize this order to whatever you want and it will effect Load Sheet, Order Sheet, and on screen PODs.

3. Today's Families on Dashboard

• Families were showing up even if they didn't have a POD - this has been resolved
• The Current POD which displays the Form Number was displaying based on today's date instead of using the date picked in the calendar. It now displays the Form Number based on the particular month specified.
  

Please let me know if there are any issues or any requests you have.

Managing Partial Deliveries

There are two general scenarios when considering partial deliveries.

Before Delivery

When you learn that a family should not receive their products before they have been marked delivered, it is helpful to be able to enter this into the system so that Load Sheets and Order Sheets can reflect these changes.

To do this, you can right click the POD, Week, or Product and choose Not Delivering.



The Delivering column will be changed to zero. Load Sheets and Order Sheets are based on the Delivering column, so these products will no longer be included, making these reports more accurate.

After Delivery

When you learn that a driver was unable to deliver products after they have already been marked delivered, you must enter this into the system to reflect actual deliveries.

To do this, you can right click the POD, Week, or Product and choose Not Delivered. This will change the Delivered column to zero.



Best Practice:
I recommend that prior to generating the Load Sheet, you enter partials (Before Delivery), then when you generate the Load Sheet, use the Deliver Load Sheet button to mark all those PODs delivered. Then when you learn of any discrepancies during delivery, enter those partials (After Delivery).

On the Horizon:
One of the features on the horizon is a Partials Report which will allow you to see PODs that were not delivered in full.

Moving application Saturday March 27th

Last week I posted about moving the application to a hosting provider. http://wicvendor.blogspot.com/2010/03/moving-application-to-external-hosting.html.

After testing, there has only been one issue which should be fixed this week.

Saturday, March 27th at 12:00 noon the application will be unavailable while I migrate it to the hosting provider.

Upon completion you will be able to access the application via http://wicvendor.com/gwdi.

The data will be migrated, so any changes you make prior to Saturday at noon will be available at the new address.

In the case of an emergency, I will leave a backup version on my development server http://thehoguets.getmyip.com/gwdi/backup.

The old address http://thehoguets.getmyip.com/wic will no longer work, and will instruct you to go to the new address.

The application should be available by Saturday at midnight. I will post another entry once it is ready.

Switching Products between Weeks

I recently received the following inquiry:

"When I get an add POD for a client - now I have two PODs and I need to deliver both - how can I change the weeks of Delivery."

I can see two potential directions to go with this scenario, so I will present both.

If you currently deliver to this family on the first and third weeks of the month, and now want to deliver on the second and fourth weeks, then we must change the weeks on the family. Because this change is made on the Family, it will effect all PODs. See Changing Delivery Week.

Another scenario would be that you do not want to change the Delivery Weeks, in other words, the family is a first and third week family, instead you want to move the products that were supposed to be delivered on week 1 to instead be delivered on week 3 (for this particular POD). This can be done on the POD by using the new Change Week feature.

First you must navigate to the POD that you want to change.

Once there, you will be presented with two tables, one for Week 1 and one for Week 2. Please note that Week 1 and Week 2 is relative to the Family. For example, if a Family is delivered on Weeks 2 and 4, then his week 1 would be the second week of the month. His week 2 would be the fourth week of the month. Now with that aside, right click on the actions button for the week you want to move products from and choose Change Week.

The products will then be merged with the products in the opposite week.

In the above question, they mention add PODs. If there is more than one POD, then you would need to do this for each POD. You can switch PODs from the POD page by right clicking on the other POD and choosing Products.

Notice that the red border will switch to the other POD and the products will likely change.

Changing Delivery Week

To change which weeks you deliver PODs for a Family you must change the Delivery Week on the Family.

To do this you must navigate to the Family. This can be done on the dashboard, search, or even on the POD page. One you find the Family, right click and choose the Family option.

You will now be presented with a dialog to make changes to the Family.

Here you can change the Delivery Week. These changes will automatically be reflected in all PODs.

Note: Currently, the application only supports delivering on Weeks 1 and 3, or 2 and 4. There is an open feature request to expand this to support Weeks 1, 2, 3, 4, 1 and 3, or 2 and 4. This would allow you to specify, for example, that a family should only be delivered once a week, and on week 3.

How to Not Deliver a Product on a POD

I recently received the following inquiry.

"When I'm editing a POD - if I want to not deliver one product - how do I do that?"

This is a great question that allows me to elaborate on a few of the latest features.

First lets show a screen shot of what options we have for a product. (These options become available after right clicking on a product. To choose an option left click the option you want.)




The options we are going to focus on are Not Delivering, Not Delivered and Not Received.

Before we can really look at what these do, we must understand what quantities (or columns) exist on a product.

When the state sends us a POD with Products, we populate the Ordered column with what the state specifies. We also populate the Delivering column with this same value. We then generate load sheets and order sheet based on the Delivering column. When we deliver the products, we populate the Delivered column, and finally when we receive the POD from the customer, we populate the Received column. In an ideal world, after delivering all products and receiving the POD back from the customer, all of these columns would have the same value.

In some cases we may not want to deliver all of the products the state has specified (Ordered). For example, if the customer requested us not to, or we have run out of products, etc.

The Not Delivering option will change the Delivering column to zero for that product, on that week, on that POD. This comes in very handy for Load Sheets and Order Sheets as we account for scenarios like those mentioned.

Now assuming that we are going to deliver the products (Delivering). And we delivered the POD using the Load Sheet. Then Delivered would get populated. But the driver may not be able to deliver everything as planned. For example, we may have tried to deliver bread. We even loaded all the bread on the truck because it was on our Load Sheet. During the course of the day, a few loaves got destroyed and we were unable to deliver for a few families.

The Not Delivered option will allow us change the populated value back to zero. This will allow us to deliver everything using the deliver option when generating our Load Sheet, and then only correct the alibis that our driver informs us of. Like the bread.

Now assuming that we delivered all of our Products and we receive the POD back from the customer. We go into the system and receive the POD which will populate the Received column. We then look closer at the POD and discover that the customer is claiming that they did not receive their box of Cheerios. For example, the family wasn't home and the products were left on the porch. Some time after the driver left, a dog ran up and stole the cheerios and ran off into the woods.

The Not Received option will allow us to change the Received value for the Cheerios to zero to reflect what the customer claims they received.

So in conclusion, if you want to not deliver a product, and you already marked it delivered (meaning the Delivered column has been populated), you would use the Not Delivered option. If you do not intend to deliver the product, then you would use the Not Delivering option.

Please post a comment if any aspects of this require further clarification.

Moving application to external hosting

I am proud to announce that I am in the process of moving the WIC Delivery Management application from my own hosting to a hosting provider.

This will allow me to use a more aesthetic address, from http://thehoguets.getmyip.com to http://wicvendor.com. I will also be able to focus more on functionality and features.

For those that did not know, I was hosting the application on my development server, in my home, running off my cable modem.

I can now guarantee 99.9% up-time (which I could not do out of my own home). As well as managed backups.

The new site is currently in testing but assuming their aren't too many unforeseen issues, we should have it live by next weekend.