• Omnis desktop solution •
The Challenge:
Over the past decade, the UK home improvement market has seen significant growth across all sectors, from Do-It-Yourself (DIY) chains and retail builders’ merchants, to specialist suppliers of quality furniture and bespoke fitted home interiors. Sharps Bedrooms is the leading fitted bedroom retailer in the UK home improvement market, and enjoys a reputation for an end-to-end customer service which incorporates an initial survey and consultation, the design and manufacture of the bedroom, through to a finished and fully fitted product. The ability to deliver a complete service is heavily dependant on their Midlands based manufacturing facility, which relies on several Omnis applications developed and maintained in-house for daily operations.
Surrey
United Kingdom
www.sharps.co.uk
The Solution:
Sharps uses two mission-critical Omnis applications for managing customer surveys and the whole manufacturing process. The first is a diary scheduling system developed to keep track of appointments for the 50 or so specialist surveyors who visit customers across the UK. Surveyors diary considerations are complex with multiple input factors such as travel time, survey duration, holidays, and so on. “Omnis has allowed us to encapsulate all of this repetitive but necessary business logic into a single, efficient centralised system that requires minimal resources to operate,” said Systems Developer James Welsh, responsible for all Omnis systems and technical support for nearly 50 Omnis users within Sharps Bedrooms.
The second major Omnis system at Sharps is one that prints all cutting lists and product labelling for factory picking. It has evolved over many years of development and is a critical part of Sharps manufacturing process. The system takesBill of Material (BOM) information from a bespoke CAD system and generates cutting and picking lists, plus product labels for the factory. Many detailed technical product rules are encapsulated at this point, including instructions on how individual panels should be cut depending on their colour and intended use. At all stages in the process, the data held within Omnis is reused many times to make optimum use of the information and avoid manual entry wherever possible. Sharps make good use of the built-in reporting features in Omnis to distribute many ‘state of business’ reports including product usage and range/colour mix statistics to all those that need it.
Why Omnis:
“The flexibility and power of Omnis affords us the agility to react to new product developments with limited developer resources at a speed that simply would not be possible in any other development environment. I often find that code operations that would require many lines of code in other languages can usually be achieved in Omnis more elegantly in just a couple of lines, with no noticeable performance hit. A good example of this being built-in list sorting,” said James Welsh.
“Coming from a background of Visual Basic development, I was impressed with the unique combination of very powerful, yet simple to learn list based development in Omnis, its robust runtime and development environment, built-in database and very efficient multi-user network usage. Omnis just works straight out of the box and doesn’t seem to require the constant updates and patches that plague other development environments.” Omnis has been used by Sharps for many years, progressing from Omnis 7 through to the latest Omnis Studio 4.2 in use today. Originally selected for the value of its all inclusive features, and in particular the built-in database and reporting facilities, the applications continue to evolve alongside Sharps’ changing business requirements and increased functionality available in Omnis itself.
