After 4.5 years, Jinny Corp., the number one multicultural distributor in the world, is excited to announce that the company’s own consolidated ERP system, JLOFT, has achieved a major milestone. The Jinny IT department has worked tirelessly to create and arrive at this major milestone, and now their efforts have resulted in a noteworthy accomplishment.
“JLOFT stands for Jinny Logistical Order Fulfillment Technologies, and when it is fully deployed, Jinny United will be running with a centralized database,” explained Maia Leung, Director of IT. As of now, two legacy internal systems are being used by the company and JLOFT will integrate all data into one system for ease of use. This single centralized database system “will help Jinny to be more agile and responsive in operation and making business decisions,” elaborated Leung.
Jinny Corp. has invested over $6.5 million in this project that is sure to benefit the company and their customers for years to come. On June 30, 2015 the team reached a significant milestone toward that goal. In recognition of this accomplishment, a substantial bonus was awarded to the group. There are a few more intermediate milestones to be reached before the targeted March 2016 release, but each step is significant and worthy of recognition, especially one of this magnitude.
JLOFT is well on its way to have a gradual implementation across all Jinny locations. Each release will be monitored and enhanced to ensure the system benefits the company as best possible. After initial R1 release, continual work will be carried out on the front end for JLOFT, in addition to enhancing functionalities and break fix support. The team also has a long-term goal of creating a world class point of sale (POS) system built on JLOFT’s foundation that will enable customers to manage stores more efficiently, in addition to easy ordering with Jinny.
Currently in Atlanta, the JLOFT team consists of: Corey Bradley, Daniel Rix, David Wallace, Harrison Mitchell, James Toles, Larry Rix, Maia Leung, Philip Ulrich and Ronald Hatchett. Additional team members include software development and database consultants that work/worked off site (Brian Leahy, Curtis Smith, Edward Montgomery, Emmanuel Stapf, Ian Howard, Jeremy Carroll, Kevin Lawson, Michael McGettigan, Neal Lester, Stan Nichols and Victor Wheeler) as well as a new QA Analyst, Business Analyst and programmer that aid in progression toward the release 1 goal.
The team enlisted the help of the consultants to help start up the project. Most project tasks were gradually handed over to the Atlanta-based members, as described below.
- Corey Bradley handled all core accounting modules, including customer transaction processing. He is instrumental in implementing the specialized hair item lookup feature. This lookup feature is modelled after the successfully implemented JOS Warrior ordering system on smart phone and tablet for the outside salesperson.
- Daniel Rix has focused on the purchasing side of JLOFT development. Intensive involvement of purchasing users has resulted in their craving for the upcoming buyer module, which will streamline workflow by all buyers.
- David Wallace is the focal point of the reporting side. Using the report library and other tools, David is responsible for the report markup, report module interface and data hookup. He worked with other team members on enhancing the report library and report module interface, as well as sharing the report markup process.
- Harry Mitchell took up the challenge from the start to design and build the sales order module. The module allows sales people to easily find and add related products as well as sales promotion group products, and easily see product information. The item bulk search has a suggestive drop down table to show results without having to jump to another tab or page.
- Philip Ulrich has performed a lot of work to stabilize internal codes in JLOFT. These behind the scenes codes are critical to the smooth and correct running of JLOFT. In addition, he provided a great deal of support to the other developers as well as giving JLOFT new capabilities (for example, object recovery for JLOFT to recover from where it left off after a crash), database structure and content testing, speed optimization, and GUI re-theming of the application. He also helped write a functioning POS prototype web application with a JLOFT backend.
- Larry Rix is the JLOFT project lead. The FogBugZ software bug and issue tracking system in use helps Jinny to manage the project with improved team synergy. Larry implemented the data file format library to enable JLOFT to exchange certain data with the legacy JBS and JMS systems during the coexistence deployment period.
- Application development consultants Brian Leahy, Edward Montgomery, Emmanuel Stapf, Ian Howard, Kevin Lawson, Neal Lester and Victor Wheeler provide guidance and senior technical expertise. In addition to working with Atlanta-based peers on design, object model, framework, application tools and skill transfer, code reviews are conducted periodically. This provides invaluable feedback and inspiration for everyone. Continual enhancement of the masking library helps increase easy coverage of user input validation.
- James Toles and developers work together in the DevChange cycle on database changes.
- Ronald Hatchett is the gatekeeper of sane data while bringing the legacy JMS data over to the JLOFT system. The Extract, Transform and Load (ETL) process, in addition to the post ETL tasks, enables Jinny to consolidate data from all Jinny companies to a centralized database.
- Both database administrators are key to database diagramming, schema change, deployment and other database-related tasks, and critical to the JLOFT system development and deployment success.
- Database consultants Curtis Smith, Jeremy Carroll, Michael McGettigan, and Stan Nichols did the initial database sizing, design, configuration and ETL setup together with the database administrators.
- Craig Wood, Dave Murphy and Paul Hardy from the technical services team helps on the infrastructure setup and ongoing support for the JLOFT team, in addition to providing technical support for the Jinny United and carrying out other projects. Application support elevation and legacy enhancement requests are handled by David Wallace, Maia Leung, Paul Hardy and Philip Masses-Valera.
Furthermore, Jinny’s JOS Mobile ordering system running on smart phone and tablet will be available for customer use very soon. It is based on the existing JOS Warrior app for Jinny’s own outside sales force use. There was a new release of the JOS Warrior on Windows smart phone and tablet in August 2015. The initial version of JOS Mobile on iOS is targeted to be available this month, September 2015. JOS Mobile on Android will be available afterward.
With this exciting news and a roadmap to availability, Jinny has invested heavily in their IT development and infrastructure initiatives as part of the project portfolios. They distinguish Jinny from the rest of the industry. This will bring Jinny and its customers to the next level and beyond.
Photo Caption:
(Left to right) Amy Tran, Maia Leung, Corey Bradley, James Toles, Harrison Mitchell, Nancy Lo, Ronald Hatchett, Paul Hardy, Philip Ulrich, Craig Wood, Joseph Chism, Larry Rix, Dave Murphy and Daniel Rix.
