29 August 2006

new Ampair website

Our partner business Ampair has its new website up and running. They are at www.ampair.com and specialise in manufacturing renewable energy systems, especially micro wind turbines, microhydro turbines, and distribute specialist solar systems.

MYOB server + memory + BoM

BLOG comments:
Two blog comments have come in re MYOB crashes:

1. A suggestion from Mick Devine of TwoKeys of Australia that we run the Premier Enterprise version, and that we run it on a server system.
- We run MYOB Accounting Plus for Windows Great Britain release version 15, release 10.0.2k. This is the best (most capable) available in the UK. I'm not sure of any (if any) difference between this and the Premier Enterprise version. Grateful if anybody could elucidate.
- We run on a PC rather than a server. That PC does only two other jobs (running Outlook and Office) and is only used by the administrator who is the main MYOB user (partly us rejigging our busines processes to accomodate MYOB crashes).
- We aim to shift MYOB to a dedicated server but this will not happen for a while. In the meantime this is as lightly a used PC as we could possible dream of.

2. A suggestion that we maximise RAM.
- We have 512Mb on all the machines. We upgraded one from 256Mb a while back and since that time we've reduced to about 3-4 crashes per day (previously we were in crashes per hour territory). However at the same time we also shifted the (master) host machine, and got very serious about use discipline in an attempt to keep a maximum of only 2-3 users logged on concurrently. So it is a little difficult to be sure which change was most important - and in any case we would rather be in crashes per month territory with 5 concurrent users (and quick response times).

Exploded BoM:
Also exploded BoM issues are beginning to drive us potty. Think of nested assemblies where we in practice build up the sub assemblies near immediately with the final product (but it is still worth breaking out the sub assembly as it gets reused as a module in many products). So the MYOB user needs to autobuild the whole sequence one at a time rather than auto cascading the build instruction through the logical hierarchy. A pain in the $%^%^ for the user, especially if they are not product 'aware'.

PO tick list:
Also on purchase orders we would like to be able to call up the item list and run down it ticking off a whol eseries of things that we know come from the same supplier, and then issuing a PO. Instead we have to open a PO and then remember all the part numbers.

Amending recurring orders:
Also on recurring orders it appears that we cannot edit (or delete) them. So trying to improve repeated purchases can be tricky and we now have a list of repeats that are almost but not quite 'right' (and what is right is in any case a moving target). Minimum functionality in this repect would be the ability to delete repeated POs.