New Features
Point of Scale

A Sneak Peek Into Astra's Latest Innovations

Critical to being competitive in today’s highly evolving business environment, is the ability to increase productivity, while maintaining or decreasing costs. The challenge is to find and use tools that are right for a company’s needs.

Astra prides itself for giving clients the right solutions with the right tools. That’s why, as a technology partner, they listen to what customers want and need when developing new features and leading-edge options that help businesses operate in the environments of tomorrow.

Astra's New A³ Option

Introducing a new Astra System option that revolutionizes the way your company handles fresh product. Astra's new Advance Availability Assessment (A³) option brings a whole new timing dimension to your inventory availability functions. "This new option not only allows a company to know what is in inventory, but when it's in inventory - instantly and in real time," said Abe Nezvadovitz. "Very simply put, it gives sales a more accurate picture of what can be sold, and when. Timing is everything!"

The A³ option deals with various facets of the product supply cycle with date sensitivity. It transparently calculates and displays product availability, taking into account incoming purchase orders, product lead time, open orders, current available inventory and production orders.

As one of the largest seafood distributors in the Rocky Mountain region, the Seattle Fish Company, located in Denver, recently began using the option. "The logic of this is simple, the results are fantastic," said Derek Figueroa, the company's Chief Financial Officer. "We previously used the white boards to validate all our inventory requests. Now, the system does the work and the white boards are a thing of the past. And, using it for the first time was a huge non-event because it worked so well."

"We're very pleased - with no headaches and no problems," added Seattle Fish President Ed Iacino. "It's really given us the tools we need to make orders work seamlessly with inventory and production."

The whiteboard wall that stood for years at Seattle Fish was
eliminated by Astra's A3

"With A³, a sales rep can now place an order, accurately and with confidence, one, two, four or ten days out without the system holding them back," said Nezvadovitz. "Similarly, if the lead time is five days, and sales wants to place an order for more than what's available for delivery in three days, the system won't let the sale go through. If sales, however, places an order for delivery in six days, they can sell as much as they need because the buyer has enough time to bring it in. Sales will always be able to give customers an accurate picture of what can and can't be sold at any given time."

According to Nezvadovitz, this option was specially designed so as not to have a significant negative impact on the performance of the order entry system. "We understand how critical it is for our clients to be able to enter orders from their customers quickly and accurately," he said.

"This option gives us a competitive edge, new capabilities and savings," said Figueroa. "It's even allowed us to reallocate our data entry people to calling customers and building customer relationships. We're very pleased with it and the staff is excited about it."

Route Control

The Astra team has developed a special Route Control feature for regional distributors. When entering an order, the feature automatically and more accurately assigns the next day delivery and route to customers or ship-to locations. If there are multiple ship-to locations, it prompts the user to determine which location so a date can then be calculated. It also considers order cutoff times and allows for the establishment of seasonal routes. In addition, a new security component protects route changes with a password and takes into account on which dates any route changes are effective.

A New Optional Feature That Generates Purchase Orders Directly From Sales Order Entry Is Now Available

The Astra Sales Order Purchase Order Interface (SOPOI) feature is especially useful for companies that frequently purchase product to fill specific sales orders, sometimes called "back-to-back" ordering. It allows a salesperson to sell product that is not in inventory and the system will then prompt from which vendor you'd like to purchase the product. It allows individual lines on the sales order to be purchased from different vendors, and after the order is complete, it will summarize those lines by vendor and create the purchase orders. The key function in this process is the linkage established between the sales order line and the purchase order. Save time and increase efficiency.

New System Features Meeting Your Needs

At Astra we are always improving the core system with features our vast client base asks for as well as incorporating innovative state of the art features you’d expect.

Here are a few spotlight improvements that are a result of the last releases:

Master Files

We have added 11 additional User Defined fields to the Customer Master.

We have written a utility program that allows you to change an Item ID and all the associated history and references to the old ID will be updated with the new ID.

EDI and UPS Worldship

We continue to enhance our EDI, Electronic Data Interchange, module (AstraEC) to include more document types. Receiving orders and sending invoices from your trading partners that require EDI has never been easier. AstraEC now has direct support with over 150 of the most common trading partners in the food industry. We recently added support for EDI documents reporting consumption information and purchase history data, as well.

In keeping current with enhancements to the UPS Worldship interface, Astra now offers direct ODBC connections to the UPS Worldship application. We have revised setup documents available by calling support.

Security & Audits

We have added several additional security controls further allowing you to customize the abilities of individual users on the system.

We have added extensive audits to master files. These audit files enable tracking of changes performed to the Item Master, Customer Master, Warehouse-Item and Lot records. In addition, any changes performed on sales order headers or details can be traced back to the exact user and time the changes were made.

Better control over system features like enable or disabling the capability of having the credit or debit memo automatically apply against the original invoice.

Reports & Labels

Several new reports have been created and added. Be sure to add these to the appropriate menu so you can utilize the information they provide.

Another improvement is in the area of Pick Labels – for those of you that have Astra Point of Scale (POSc) feature where your electronic scales are integrated to your order picking and invoicing, you now have the ability to generate pick labels only for items handled by the POSc stations or only those that are not, or both…

In addition, if you sell to customers that have unique label requirements, we added support for specific label formats based on the customer the order is for.

In the PO receiving area, we added the ability to instant print the receiving worksheet right after entering the PO, as well as in a batch form based on the expected date of the PO.

End Of Period Procedures

We know that running routine tasks at the end of each week can be tedious so we improved the end of week history update programs to allow them to be scheduled and run non-interactively on a predetermined day of the week and time. This task makes sure your weekly sales figures accurately reflect the weekly period.