Re: Working towards e-commerce. -- BPCS-L

There are things that can be done with e-commerce. I just not know HOW to do it, or the pros and cons of different software solutions.

You can have access to a web site, or to part of a web site constrained by people having to key in some password. You issue passwords that are unique to each customer. Any personnel at that customer can use the same password that is for that customer. That gets them to a section of that website that is information just for that customer. Each customer has their own area, secured by password.

Let's suppose the identity that is password secured is customer # 123456. Your query/ftp of info regarding customer # 123456 is sent to web page section that has that # some place embedded, for the purpose of making it easier to not accidentally show one customer info on a different customer.

This is not automatically correct. There are lots of opportunities for human error. I believe that when running something that is to be added to the area for a particular customer to view, that some internal person should verify you not got anything mixed up. It should be part of the check list.

Right before we do Billing (405 CD), we run a CL which generates Query/400 which repopulates a work file with info about latest shipments. Then someone on a PC runs some Internet job (I not know how that works, someone else programmed it, using language I not know, and the whole thing secured against my view), that sends info, selected by customer, to those selected customers.

Our organization is in the process of moving towards e-commerce which I know can mean a lot of different things to a lot of different people. Ultimately, our goal is to improve communications with our customers. We can crawl into this by running queries/reports on the AS/400 and then e-mailing them to customers or posting to a website via ftp. In the latter case, I'm not sure of the best way to limit specific customers to seeing just their orders. Any suggestions?

In the longer term, we are exploring LANSA's Smartweb for BPCS. We are on the ancient version of 3.1 with Nexgen Y2K mods. Has anybody out there had much experience in using LANSA? Any comments or suggestions would be greatly appreciated. TIA.

Jenny

- Al Macintyre See Al at http://www.ryze.com/go/Al9Mac Find BPCS Documentation Suppliers http://radio.weblogs.com/0107846/stories/2002/11/08/bpcsDocSources.html

This mailing list archive is Copyright 1997-2024 by midrange.com and David Gibbs as a compilation work. Use of the archive is restricted to research of a business or technical nature. Any other uses are prohibited. Full details are available on our policy page. If you have questions about this, please contact [javascript protected email address].

Operating expenses for this site are earned using the Amazon Associate program and Google Adsense.