Home Page Snippets – a modern KPI in Cloud MRP

Introduction

What are these Snippets on my Home Page in ERPAG? How should I use these Snippets? What is the purpose of Snippets on the Home Page?

Today’s business dynamics are very hectic. The amounts of data being input and electronically processed are increasing day by day. The need for business is to digitize almost every aspect of the business, resulting in a “data jungle”. In so much data, sometimes it happens that important information is “masked” or ignored.

Are snippets important?

We’ll give you a not-so-happy example from practice.
One of our customers, in addition to their core business, was also selling Fitness Supplements. According to local regulations, such products required LOT tracking. The most important thing was the Expiration Date. There should be no expired goods in stock and in sales. The system is set up so that a LOT number (with expiration date) is recorded on the receipt. And also, a LOT number must be specified when packing a sales order in ERPAG.

Checking was simple, just activate a proper report (Serial / Lot number).

The expired lot numbers would be marked red in this report.

Activating such a report was part of the morning routine of the warehouse operator. As sales of such items had just begun and most purchases were new, the expiration date was relatively far away. This resulted in reports being blank almost every day (there were no items with expired dates) and the operator activated report less and less frequently.

In most cases, the repetition is very annoying and boring and the operator ends up assuming that the report will always be blank (because probably all the items have been sold) and stops controlling the report. The epilogue of this story is that in the process of the local inspection control, there were a lot of goods that had expired lot numbers (even by a few years).

In a conversation with the manager, we came to the solution – every morning when the operator activates our application, that report is displayed first (whether he wants it or not). The manager’s literal words were “I want this report in front of me every day.”

This happened in 1998, meanwhile, the solution has evolved and we call the current solution in ERPAG “snippets”.

The Snippets

In our earlier blog (https://www.erpag.com/news/the-snippets) we explained that most of our lists have ‘snippets’ on the very top.

These same snippets you can set up on your Home Page in ERPAG.

The snippets will always display on top, as the manager from our story said: “I want it to always be in front of my eyes”.

With this, we managed to always show the data that is important to us via Snippets.

In our example, the operator would include two snippets, Expired and Expired (Next 7 days), and thus always have the information about the expired lot numbers.

The snippets are interactive, so even if you have one data, within one click you can open the report or filter down the list.

Note: Due to system performances we only allow 20 snippets on Home Page.

The data displayed on the Home Page are as they were when you opened the application. If you want to see the actual/renewed data, you have to click on the refresh button on the right side.

Customization of Snippets

Our goal is to enable the customization of the ERPAG application so it can meet real business needs. That’s why we dedicate a lot of time and effort to enable users to tailor ERPAG to their specific needs.

In our example, the focus was on the expiration date. While to someone it will be important to know the quantity below the minimum, or missed sales order date.

Any operator can, as they wish (and if their privileges allow it), place snippets on the homepage. It is also possible to customize the background color, e.g. if the quantity below the minimum is important, the snippet can be highlighted red.

Snippets in Mobile / Phone mode

When you open ERPAG through your smartphone (via browser), the home page snippets will be shown in one or two columns, depending on the screen resolution of the device.

Note: ERPAG Mobile App (iOS / Android) is a special application primarily designed for manipulating inventory and Point of Sales. There is no home page in it and therefore no snippets. To use snippets, you must open ERPAG through your web browser on your device (Safari, Chrome, Android browser, etc.).