July 2010

OPERATION SMART

Our 2010 version is now ready for the market and has been tested at two of our current sites. They are now both live and all the required functionality is running smoothly.

Even though we had few problems with previous versions one client experienced difficulties with the SQL upgraded version. These problems have been overcome in the older version and eliminated in the latest version. The latest version continuoulsy runs in SQL compatible mode.

Our new version has been simplified for end-users and yet it is more powerful than ever before. But the end users do not have to become aquanted with many of the additions as it is mostly automation of data population and integrity evaluation.

OPERATOIN SMART opens sub-menus from the main menu for all main registers. Before they were all in list views but have now changed to table views. Table views can contain large amounts of data with little effect on the network. Using table menus has made the filtering and searching functions better and easier than ever before.

The main menu can also be changed and specified to each and every user that accesses the system. This means instead of having to enter security profiling as the only security feature as in previous version, each and every control can be hidden on the main menu. In other words the menu can now be user specific. Once this is done the security profiling is vastly minimised and easy to do.

A lot more added feature have been implemented for users who want to advance into a proper solution providing system. Just a few features are the defaults set in the 'Division' and 'Default' registers that control many of the views and data population automation. Further to this registers such as the 'Service' register now contain several more default entries for auto data population when generating work orders, scheduled or un-scheduled.

The main alteration that affected the application in over 100 registers was converting the 22 level hierarchy to one screen that identify's only the maintainable items that each screen contains. This register is called the MSI Register which is auto populated when new data is entered into the system. If the item is marked as a maintainable item it will automatically be populated into the MSI Register. Now the end user only has to open one table to be presented with all the maintainable items regardless of the level. This makes the work order screen less busy and it is easier to select the maintainable item. In the schedule register it is also less complicated and a lot less screens are linked (20 in total), thus making the opening of the screen faster and better for the network. It should take no longer than 40 seconds to create a work order, in fact even that is long.

Overall the system has more than 500 improvements that may seem accessible and may even cause you to wonder why so many improvements were needed. The truth is, very few improvements were actually needed but after doing serious research we found better ways of executing many commands and better ways of making the end-users life easier. The improvements also contain more than a dozen new reports.

Overall OPERATION SMART 2010 is an application we are proud of and from a functional point of view it now competes with the best in the world. However, the price has not altered which means that you now get much more value for your money.