BRP- Business resource planning.

Contact: nyberg@alliansedata.com

Why use BRP:

  What your company may obtain by using a planning system.

• Better control over projects, tasks, appointments, resources and documents.
• Better flow of information.
• Act as a structured and serious business towards customers and suppliers.

Functionality  in  BRP:

• Project management
• Tasks and appointments with assigned resources, which can be structured in Projects.
• Contacts and Companies
• Purchasing and Invoicing.
• Follow up activities like Projects, Tasks, Appointment and Resources.
• Design workflows that guides the users between the modules in BRP.
• Manage document information and easily produce and locate your documents.
• Relate documents to your company and contacts relations as well as projects. 
• Relations between the objects (Projects, Tasks, Appointment, Resources, Contacts, Companies and Documents)

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BRP Browser

Relations

The relations between Objects in BRP is   like this:

A Project, Task or Appointment can have several related Documents in the document management module.

Files

Contacts and Company

BRP contains Company and Contacts registers. One Company may have many Contacts and many addresses. To store several addresses for the same company, use the Company Name as First Name in the Contacts table, and the Type of address (e.g. Delivery) as Last Name.

The Contacts form looks like this:

Tasks and Appointments

You can assign several resources to a Task or Appointment. The purpose is to control the requirements and the location (where the resource will be / are located). If the resource is not available then you can check it for Purchase. Then you can use BRP to print out Purchase order documents like Inquiries, Purchase orders and Reminders. You can also use BRP to print out Sales documents like Quotation, Order confirmation and Invoice. Records marked with the Sale flag can be printed on sales documents.

Figure: Resources in Task

When clicking on one of the "Order document" buttons, e.g. Quotation, the form in figure "Select Orderlines" will appear:

Figure: Select Orderlines

The records shown here is based on the following conditions from the "Resources in Task" form:

1. Invoice Company and Invoice Address are required.

2. If you selected a sales order document as Quotation, Order confirmation, Invoice or Invoice reminder in the form "Resources in Task", then all lines checked for Sale are shown.

3. If you selected a purchase order document as Inquiry, Purchase order or Purchase reminder in the form "Resources in Task", then all lines checked for Purchase are shown.

If you want to see all order lines independent of which task they belong to, check the "Show all" flag in the "Select Orderlines" form.

Check the lines you want to send to the document, and decide if it is a Final document (all records printed gets the Final Flag). Press Continue to print it out. Only set the Final flag if you are printing out a final Invoice or Purchase order. The Final flag is telling you that you are finished with printing the record to a document. But if you need to print the record later, you can reset the Final flag in the  "Resources in Task" form, record by record. Or you can Check "Include finalized lines" before clicking one of the document buttons.

Control the Flow

It is possible to use BRP to Control the business flow and to Relate the flow to the modules in BRP. The Edit menu gives you access to maintain or add new flows. The saved flows are available below the Flow menu.

Understanding the Toolbar

The BRP Browser Toolbar

	Start - Starts the session or module related to the activated Object in the browser. Correspond to double clicking an Object.
	Find - Find a record in the browser tree based on input.
	Flow - Starts the Flow diagram viewer.
	Report - Prints a report if there is a report available for the selected object.
	Activity Grid - Shows the Activity grid with periodic views of Tasks and Appointments.
	Reminder - Shows the Reminder window.
	Files - View related Files, or Create New files. See Files. You can relate files to all kinds of objects in the Browser.

Toolbars for the modules

It is important to understand that we operate in two different modes when accessing data in BRP. The modes we're referring to is Edit Mode which gives write access to the database and Search Mode that lets You browse the data. You have to be in  Edit Mode when you want to add a new record, edit the current record or delete it. Edit mode is the default mode. In  Search Mode we don't have write access to the data. You choose Search Mode when you want to find certain records based on  ID, Company name, Template, Date etc.

Edit Mode

	New - Initializes for registering a new Record.
	Copy - Copy information from an existing record to a new.
	Cancel New - Cancels the new record operation. Appears only after New or Copy is chosen and until Save or Cancel New is done.
	Save - Saves the current record. If you have registered a new record, used Copy or edited an existing one, you have to save it to store the changes.
	Delete - Deletes the current record.
	Change Mode - Switch to Search Mode.

Search Mode

	Change Mode - Switch back to Edit Mode.
	New Search Initializes for doing a Search. The operation actual done is clearing all fields and enabling the ID field for input. Then you have to type in words or pick items from combo boxes, to specify your search criteria.
	Find After you have built the search criteria in the form, You need to push the Find button to get the desired records. If you get a hit when using Find, all records matching Your criteria's are displayed in a new Window. From here You may navigate to desired record by double-clicking the row marker (located at the left side of each row) Seeking with Wildcards is supported in text boxes. If you want to Find all Companies that starts with the letter E,  type E* in the Company text box. Finally press the Find button.

Common Tools for both modes

	Report - Prints out a report. If You have done a search, the Report will be restricted to the search result.
	Files - View related Files, or Create New files. See Files.

Tools for some modules

In the Task/Appointment module.

	Item to Task - Add an Item as a resource to the Task or Appointment. See Resources.
	Items in Task - Edit or View the Items that are resources for the Task or Appointment. See Resources.
	Person to Task - Add a Person as a resource to the Task or Appointment. See Resources.
	Persons in Task - Edit or View the Persons that are resources for the Task or Appointment. See Resources.

In the Document module:

	Open Doc - Brings up the related document in the Word processor.
	Merge - Creates a document in MS Word based on selected Template and registered information in the current record (like the address to the Receiver, subject etc.).

In the Document module, you can see a "E"-button to the right of Task and Receiver Attention. This button makes it possible to select a Task or Receiver Attention from the ListBox.

Other Functions

Lookup tables

Figure: lookup tables.

Lookup tables like  Document types, Templates, Status, Countries etc. are available from buttons on the right side of the Combo boxes. When the Look up button is clicked, the values are presented in a Grid. Navigating the cursor and Editing cells in the Grid, is pretty similar to navigating in a Spreadsheet program like Excel. To move the cursor to another cell, use the arrow keys. "Enter" or "Tab" may be used to place the cursor in the next cell. If you want to edit the cell, type directly in the cell. Undoing the last edit operation is obtained by pressing "Escape". To force a linefeed in a cell, press "Ctrl+Enter"

Set as Default Value

In the Document module, you can specify which values that are assigned to fields when a New record is initialized. E.g. you may use your own name as Responsible almost every time when registering a new record. To avoid typing this each time for new records, you can set a default value for the field. Set as Default Value by clicking the right mouse button at a text or combo box that you want to assign a default value for. The current text is saved as the default value. From this Pop Up, menu you can also Remove the Default Value.

Dates

Entering dates in a date field can be done by holding the Ctrl key down while pressing numbers. For example hold the Ctrl key down while pressing 0, the date of to day will be entered. Ctrl down while pressing 30 gives the date 30 days ahead.

Before You Start

IMPORTANT

If several users shall use BRP, it is important that each
client uses the database (unidoc.mdb) located on a shared network drive. Always install BRP to a local drive. Manually copy Unicode.mdb to a shared network directory, and change the Pointer in easydocs.ini. Remember to take regular backup of unidoc.mdb.

The very first time the client is started, you will be prompted for assigning
a database location (the path to the database file unidoc.mdb). You may need to change the database location because you want to bring BRP with you on your Laptop, for viewing purposes. To change the database location setting, stored in easydoc.ini, just delete easydocs.ini from your windows directory. Next time you start BRP, you will be prompted for assigning a database location.

Set Last Used ID’s

When creating a New record a unique ID is automatically assigned. The new ID is an increment of the last assigned ID. Before you start to use BRP it is necessary to set the latest used ID's. Set Last Used ID is available by clicking the Flow button located in the toolbar of the BRP browser. Then select Setup from the Flow menu.

Templates

The Document module uses predefined MSWord templates that are installed to the target directory (e.g. c:\Program Files\BRP). Feel free to organize templates and paths to produced documents in folders as it suits you. Check that the path information in the Template table is correct according to where you want to store future produced documents and templates. The Template table is available in the Setup Flow (like "Set Last Used ID's" above).



Good Luck!