Product Inventory & Portfolio Generation
A system built to manage an inventory and automate portfolio reports.
Replacing Excel with Automation
This is a system that was built 12 years ago. It is still in use today.
It was designed and built to solve a specific business problem; a wine wholesaler in London was producing portfolio reports by hand via Excel, which was error-prone and very manual; I was engaged to automate the reports and add some basic CRM features, along with ensuring data was more secure.
The solution is an eXpress Application Framework (XAF) Web Forms application (it was 12 years ago, after all); this allowed me to rapidly build to the exact requirements, customising where necessary.
Portfolio Report
The portfolio report is generated as a PDF document with a click of a link. Users can define up front which products should appear in a portfolio by selecting a product list. The report generates a list of countries, regions and suppliers, and groups the products into these so that they are in a predictable order.
Each product has its type displayed (red, white, sparkling, etc.) and users can specify features on products - e.g. vegan, vegetarian - and assign icons to these to be displayed in the report.
The system also features the powerful DevExpress grid, which allows users to search, filter, group, and export data to a variety of formats; there are also a number of other reports included with the system, and users can define their own analysis and reports if required in the web UI.