How can we use simple scripts in TIBCO Spotfire® solutions for operational purposes, checking inventory and creating purchase orders?

Challenge

Let’s assume the following situation. Sales agent negotiates to sell a particular product directly at customer. He has no access to the company information system for various reasons. The system does not provide any insight into the state of stocks via mobile devices or the company is not granted the access to the information system because of the nature of work, especially if the agent is not employed by the principal company. Orders are usually carried out when he returns to the office or after meeting with colleagues later. After that he provides information to the customer if the desired product is available or not. That requires additional time and work, the possibility of errors is increased.

With TIBCO Spotfire® solutions company provides the sales agent to insight into their stocks in real time and thus information about delivery options, anytime and anywhere. In the second step, as well as faster creation of sales orders and thus deliveries.

How?

Solutions

We can grant accesss to the Web server Spotfire®, also via mobile devices. The current status and availability of the stock can be checked – immediately during the meeting at the customer. The availability of the supply can be provided immediately.

At the same time with simple script we can create order table based on the selected items. By pressing the control button the order is automatically sent to the selected email address.

With TIBCO Spotfire® solutions there is no need to develop additional modules in the business information system for monitoring and ordering through mobile devices. Especiall simple ERP system often do not provide such moduls.

Let’s look in more detail.

How Spotfire was used

In the analysis, let’s check the status of stocks.

Using button   data of the marked product  are transferred into property control as a suggested item to order.

We can add quantity and comment and with another click we add this item to draft order table. The product is seen in the table order below.

We can check other products and, if necessary, enter new orders as described above.

All products are now seen in the order table.

Of course, order can be further added, edited or deleted.

When editing is finished the table is send by  mail when pressing this button   as html attachment to recepients we define in the script or property.

Iron Python scripts

Iron Python scripts are short applets that allow you to perform various functions, which are not part of the program Spotfire®. We call certain objects and use them in execution of the program.

There are many scripts available on the web, which among others allow the creation of tables and sending tables in different forms by e-mail

This was an example of a script that deletes the selected rows in a particular table.

The web offers many examples of the script related directly to Spotfire®. In that way also non programers can use them in different situations. For the most demanding users a wide range of functionality is available with such scripts, thus they can greatly enrich the standard features of analytical solutions even beyond pure analytical purpose. In this way, companies can save a lot of time and money.

One such web site is located here.

In addition to Iron Python scripts Spotfire can execute statistical scripts in the statistical language R and Java scripts.