Diamond Interiors Order Processing System

Diamond Interiors are a successful furniture supply company providing a professional and friendly service to many companies in the region and throughout the whole of the UK. Diamond Interiors came to us to ask us to build them a system for the management and processing of their quotes and orders. Previously, they used to use spreadsheets to manage the process, but this was becoming difficult as the company expanded, and jobs were not being turned around quickly due to the slow process of creating quotes for customers.

First of all, we identified the slowest or most complicated elements of the work flow, which turned out to be the quoting process. When a customer requested a quote for several items, the codes and descriptions would have to be manually found and then written into the quote. We were able to quickly design a system to manage this process by using an auto-completing process whereby the user could enter a single character or more, and matching products would appear to allow the user to select the correct product. Matching descriptions from previous quotes would appear so the user could then select the correct "finish" for the product. The typical buying and selling prices would appear, so that the margin on the order could be calculated dynamically and displayed to the user as soon as any changes were made. Once the quote was complete and had been accepted by the customer, the system then automatically sent the relevant purchase orders and sales order directly to Sage.

The system would need to integrate with Sage Line 50, now known as Sage Accounts 2008, and be able to process quotes into the necessary Purchase Orders and Sales Order. We have worked on other Sage products, previously with a third party company providing a web service, but as Sage Developers we decided that direct integration would be the most cost effective option.

The Sage integration proved the most difficult; as this was the first time we had integrated with this particular Sage product. We program all our products in the web application language PHP, but after extensive research it was discovered that no-one had successfully integrated Sage Line 50 into a PHP application and recorded their success. Determined to deliver the best solution to the customer, we were able to successfully write a library to integrate with Sage using COM objects. The process of creating the purchase orders and sales orders in Sage happens in a matter of seconds.

Overall, the project has been a great success, providing the customer with a cost effective solution to their problem. If you have any questions about this or any of our other case studies, please do not hesitate to contact us using the link at the top of the page, or give us a call on 01744 22266 and we will be happy to help.