Our production support team integrated Slack with the company’s DB2 database to help them track the publication status of store orders. This integration allowed the support team to quickly alert the appropriate company resources if any discrepancies were observed in the ordering process. Our engineers then set up an automated process, called a cron job, that runs every hour from 12:30 to 3:30 AM Pacific time. This process is responsible for publishing the order publication status, which gives the company near-continuous monitoring of store order status. This time frame was chosen to validate the total number of orders that matched the forecast.
Our team implemented the solution in two stages. In the first stage, the system retrieves the total number of orders forecasted for the day. The new system also pulls the number of orders created and the pending forecast through the end of the hour. The system also checks for skipped orders that missed deadlines, invalid orders, and order delivery schedules. It also checks for duplicate orders and calculates how many orders remain unfulfilled.
In the second stage, the new solution posts order counts to the integrated Slack messaging service every hour. Image 3 shows a mockup of a posted Slack channel message.
As an example, let’s say that the order forecast is for 100 stores, one order each, distributed as shown in Image 3 above. In this example, an alert is triggered if the order cut-off is at 3:15 AM Pacific time and only 90 orders have been published. The new system sends out a message to all stakeholders regarding the missing ten orders via email and Slack. The replenishment team now has time to complete the missing orders manually and, therefore, can avoid any supply chain disruptions.
Key points in our solution include:
- DB2 to Slack integration: Integrating the company’s DB2 database with Slack allows the company to post messages to a Slack channel. The decision to use Slack was a brilliant design choice made by our engineering team because Slack is available on all PC platforms, browsers, and most mobile devices.
- Hourly postings: Another key innovation our team introduced was to post order totals each hour. This gives members more time to react proactively in cases where a problem arises, such as orders that missed the agreed-upon deadline or duplicate orders.
