dcommerce.io

Multi-Channel Case Study

A case study highlighting how dCommerce helped a heavy goods producer digitise the publishing of their production schedule and implement a real-time feedback loop, using the Multi-Channel plan.

Overview

Legacy process: Manual data extraction from MYOB AccountRight to Excel; physical paper printouts distributed to production operators.

Objective: Real-time production visibility on tablets used by production operators without extra MYOB licenses or data security risks.

Solution framework: A unidirectional polling interface through the MYOB AccountRight API, secured by OAuth 2.0, enabling secure and automated data retrieval, displayed in a read-only dashboard.

Challenge

The client is a regional heavy-goods producer who manufactures a wide range of products. Some are custom-to-order, others are managed via recurring contracts. This requires a dynamic production schedule to ensure on-time order fulfilment.

All incoming orders are processed centrally in MYOB AccountRight.

The production team need a real-time schedule to manage production, packing, and loading.

To bridge the gap, the company used a manual process. An administrator extracted active order data from MYOB into a spreadsheet, formatted a basic schedule, printed copies, and delivered them to the production team.

Whenever an order changed or an urgent request arrived, the process was repeated. This caused significant operational strain due to the time required to circulate the updated schedule and the risk that outdated schedules would remain in circulation.

Key considerations:

Data security risks: The production team could not access MYOB directly. Software license costs, system complexity, and financial data security were barriers.

Highly administrative process: On a daily basis, hours were spent on data extraction, manual formatting, and paper distribution.

Scheduling latency: Production teams often worked from outdated schedules. This caused overruns, inefficiency, and delays in custom batches.

Solution

The business needed a platform to automatically ingest sales orders and display a live production schedule on tablets used by production operators.

The solution was to implement a cloud-hosted middle tier that provides a secure, one-way integration from MYOB AccountRight to an order dashboard accessible by the production team.

The platform connects to MYOB AccountRight via an OAuth 2.0 layer and utilises standard API endpoints to retrieve the entered order and invoice data.

A notable technical challenge was the volume of data to be consumed via the MYOB AccountRight API. Multiple orders and invoices were generated daily, updated frequently, and required to be synchronised within a short timeframe after being inserted into MYOB to ensure near-real-time visibility to production. Furthermore, the MYOB platform enforces fixed API rate limits for the subscription tier in use, which could result in synchronisation failures if the quota is exceeded. To solve this, the system deployed dynamic throttling of API requests:

Business-hours gearing: Synchronisations are dynamically weighted to occur predominantly during active business hours.

Adaptive synchronisation frequency: Instead of a fixed loop, the polling frequency is calculated based on remaining daily API requests and active orders for the day.

Payload minimisation: The system tracks whether data has changed. Only new or updated orders trigger detailed requests, preserving API quota.

The client requested that the synchronisation be one-way and read-only to ensure administrative control of data entry in MYOB.

Production operators have access to the production schedule but not to accounting data.

To assist with reporting status back to the front office, the production team have the ability to update a subset of fields within the dashboard - not synchronised back to MYOB but visible to the front office.

This provides the front office with a feedback loop for handling customer queries about delivery schedules.

Benefits

By automating production data sharing via a cloud-hosted solution, the business significantly reduced dispatch times and improved operational efficiency.

Real-time schedule visibility: Production teams and heavy equipment operators use tablets to view the live order schedule, which adjusts instantly as sales invoices are cleared by the front office.

Front office feedback: The front office has visibility of production status, which wasn’t possible with the paper-based system.

Reduced administrative overhead: Exporting, formatting, printing, and delivering paper-based schedules are no longer required.

Accounting security has been maintained: The production team can view orders and delivery schedules. There is no requirement to access the business’s financial system.

Managed cloud infrastructure: The system is fully managed and hosted. It delivers integration stability without needing additional administrative or IT staff.


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