Trade Simple November 2011 Product Update - Part 2

Integration of trade simple with the New Platform


Existing Integration with FnB Manager

Following the purchase of trade simple by Fourth Hospitality, a number of points of integration were created between FnB Manager and trade simple and there are a number of customers using this configuration today.

Broadly speaking, trade simple enables FnB to communicate electronically with the suppliers — by importing products and catalogues; transmitting Purchase Orders; receiving Acknowledgements,Confirmations and Delivery Notes to update the order details; and receiving validated Invoice and Credit Notes for matching — while the users retain all of the FnB Manager functionality for order–creation, stock control and invoice matching.

Existing Integration with Star Chef (and Caterwide) for TRG

The Restaurant Group had been a long–standing customer of both Star Logic and ABS using Star Chef and trade simple along with Torex's Caterwide system for order–creation and stock (cf. FnB integration above). As part of this project an automated interface was created between Star Chef and trade simple for importing products and catalogues.

In essence, the process is as follows:

  1. The supplier and customer agree new recipe items, price changes, etc. These are loaded into Star Chef (by the customer or supplier) and modelled into recipes and menus

  2. At the appropriate time, the product data is exported by Star Chef to trade simple (and Caterwide) and — subject to passing the automated validation steps within trade simple — becomes live

  3. Orders are then created in Caterwide using this data and passed to trade simple which then transmits them to the supplier. In some instances trade simple uses Star Chef–provided data to convert pack–sizes, quantities, and prices from inventory–friendly Caterwide values into supplier–friendly ones for transmission

  4. Any supplier responses are fed back into Caterwide from trade simple — again using Star Chef data to reverse the pack–size conversions as required

  5. On period close, Caterwide exports Goods Received Notes to trade simple (again with Star Chef–defined pack–size conversion)for automated matching against supplier invoices and Star Chef–prices(as provided in the catalogues)

Existing Integration with the New Platform for Spirit

The timescale constraints of the Spirit project meant that a simple integration between trade simple and the New Platform was required. The solution that is now live with Spirit is effectively an amalgam of the previous FnB and Caterwide approaches:

New pubs and new ‘Trading Relationships’ established between a Spirit site and a Supplier are entered into the New Platform and then passed into trade simple via existing data–loading interfaces. The data is effectively duplicated.

Orders placed in the New Platform for Carlsberg and Wincanton are passed to trade simple using a mechanism cloned from FnB Manager (see above). Similarly, Acknowledgements, Confirmations and Delivery Notes are passed back fromtrade simple to the New Platform. The order details are updated and the changes from the originally placed order are highlighted. This also ensures that, on physical receipt of the delivery, the Order in the New Platform being matched is as accurate as possible and this reduces the need for user intervention.

On Period Close at each Pub (in the New Platform), a Goods Received Note is passed to trade simple for each delivery that has been entered and approved. This Goods Received Note reflects the actual quantities, Products and Cost Prices that have been entered in to FnB. Trade simple will then match this to the incoming electronic invoices using its standard Invoice Management functionality.

EPOD — Electronic Proof of Delivery

As an enhancement to the current trade simple functionality, we have developed of EPOD – Electronic Proof of Delivery – functionalitywithin trade simple. This is, by and large, core trade simpledevelopment and will provide a new and useful feature to both legacy trade simple and the New Platform customers.

Any supplier who is using "sign on glass" technology when a delivery has been made will now be able to transmit an Electronic Proof of Delivery message to trade simple. This will contain the delivery details (Delivery Note references, products and delivered quantities) as signed for by the pub manager on the driver's Hand Held Terminal upon receiving the physical delivery. Trade simple will then pass this delivery data to the New Platform (or any other 3rdparty stock system) where it will be loaded and approved in to stock as applicable. The key benefit for the customer is the extremely high degree of accuracy and the elimination of the need for user intervention in the goods–inwards process.

Development and testing has been completed and the new functionality went into production in November. More than 50 EPODs have already been processed by trade simple and the New Platform.

Towards Full Integration into the New Platform

In parallel with the work with Spirit, the trade simpleDevelopment Team have been engaged in a significant amount of new development to fully incorporatetrade simple into the New Platform. This can be divided into two key areas:

  • Common data and the Message Relay

  • New trade simple–like New Platform screens and functionality

Today trade simple exists as two, closely integrated parts: the messaging engine and the website:

  • The messaging engine is the heart of trade simple. Its function is to receive documents (and other messages) from our customers, validate and process them and then,usually, to send them on to their intended recipients. All of this is done automatically and in a resilient, robust and secure way

  • The website is the main user interface to trade simple. From the website, users can carry out tasks such as placing orders, receipting deliveries,configuring units,managing catalogues, searching and viewing messages, and soon. It is worth noting that however, that there are some customers who have never seen the website and interact solely with the messaging engine via their own systems

We say that these two parts are integrated because they both use the same database and document store; changes that occur in one are (more or less) immediately reflected in the other.

However,under the New Platform this changes significantly as the website portion of trade simple will be no longer be used and the initial user interface to trade simple will be the the New Platform website. This presents a number of technical challenges. Nevertheless, it should be noted that something very exciting that the New Platform offers is a framework for other interfaces to any of our modules, such as other websites, mobile devices and Apps, which may be created by Fourth Hospitality or indeed by third–parties.

The Message Relay

When an order is created today it is written by the website into a trade simple database. A few seconds later the messaging engine picks up the order information from the database,constructs an XML document from it and, eventually, sends it to the supplier using that supplier's chosen format and delivery method.

However, under the New Platform this order will be written by the the New Platform website to thethe New Platform database which, literally and metaphorically is miles away from the trade simple messaging engine.

To further complicate things,customers using the New Platform will be split into “sets”, and their data will be split with them. A set is a group of servers that are dedicated to one or more customers. The main reasons for this are scalability and performance.

The solution, simply put, was to build a service that both the New Platform and trade simple will use to share data; wherever these applications are physically located and how the data is distributed. Informally this service is known as the Message Relay. The relay accepts messages from either the New Platform or trade simple and, based on the contents of the message, forwards them on to the appropriate server:

  1. When the relay receives a message destined for the New Platform from trade simple it needs to determine to which set within the New Platform it must send that message. It does this by looking at the customers that are "participants" of the message — for example,the supplier that sent the Invoice and the delivery location that received it — and then forwarding the message to the set, or sets, that contain those participants' data

  2. Receiving a message intotrade simple from the New Platform is much more straightforward. trade simple simply needs to look at the contents and participants of the message and determine the processing that needs to happen. And this is exactly analogous to what the messaging engine is doing for "normal" messages it receives today by email, FTP, EDI, etc. Easy(ish)

This is all up and running and some of the “hooks” betweentrade simple and the New Platform that make it work have been completed also.

In addition to this, alongside the relay, there is also a supporting group of services and functions that ensure that the same static data is available to both the New Platform and trade simple (the messaging engine) no matter which database they are stored in. So, for example, both systems will “know” what they need to know no matter if I create a new pub using the the New Platform website or if I load up 500 new pubs using the trade simple Unit Load function. The team continues to work on these functions.

The New User Interface and Functions

While trade simpleand FnB have a number of features in common for the generation of PurchaseOrders, they also have many differences. In order to support both sets of existing customers in the New Platform, it will need to continue to offer both approaches. But beyond this, the New Platform also allows is to combine the best of both systems to make the New Platform something altogether better for old and new customers.

For example we expect to combine trade simple’s Budget Authorisation workflow with FnB Procurement's workflow to produce a much better tool for spend–management; or to combine trade simple's complex delivery schedule management with FnB to provide higher–quality order–data to suppliers.

Because of the time constraints mentioned above, Spirit's current version of the New Platform feels a bit like (a slimmed–down version of) FnB Manager. No trade simple features have been included. Therefore, the work remaining to be done is the conversion of most of the trade simple Online Ordering and other screens into the New Platform. The team continues to work on these functions.

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