On-line order status history

Wed, 26 Sep 2007 10:33:36 GMT

In my previous post, I showed the form for entering order status updates in VisibleLogistics. After you update the status, the order details page shows the new status:

Apart from the way that this is highlighted on the web page, perhaps, this is something you could also store in a simple spreadsheet that you might use to keep track of orders. The advantage of software like VisibleLogistics that uses a proper database, however, is that it is straightforward to do things like keep a complete history.

This is what you see when you select an order's status history tab: all of an order's status updates, which probably shows an order's progression through the supply chain, depending on what you and your business partners choose to enter.

This is the kind of thing that you do not usually need, but when you do it is invaluable to be able to check back and see what happened when.

Simple status update notifications

Thu, 20 Sep 2007 16:31:07 GMT

In my previous post, I described how VisibleLogistics lets you share share order details on the web. Putting information on-line where your business partners can see it is useful, but only the start. Instead of using web and e-mail separately, VisibleLogistics combines the two so you enter information once, and get notifications to keep people up-to-date as well as a web page to refer back to.

For example, suppose you just shipped an order. VisibleLogistics gives you a simple form to update an order's status.

All you have to do is select an update status option (one click), select a new status (two clicks) and then save changes (three clicks). VisibleLogistics then generates and sends an e-mail notification to the other parties on the order, just like the order created e-mail notification I described before. This e-mail notifies the buyer, for example, that the order has been shipped and provides a link to the web page that shows the order details.

Note that the status update form shown above lets you enter some additional text, e.g. ‘dispatched by mail’, that is included in the status update, in case you want to add more information than just choose a status. You can also choose a different date or time, in case ‘now’ is not when the order actually shipped.

Not only is this a very quick and easy way to record the order's status, compared to updating a spreadsheet, say, but you save more time because you do not have to e-mail your customer to tell them that their order has shipped. That would take a lot more than three clicks.

BitLogistics - status tag

On-line order status history

Simple status update notifications