As time goes on and as a business grows, it generates more and more information.  Information about sales, information about customers, information about products…  The list can seem endless.

Therefore, one of our top priorities when designing OMINS was how to deal with this data.  How to make it easy to store, but more importantly how to make it easy to retrieve when you want it.

The most obvious solution to this problem was building OMINS around powerful search functionality.  Allow the user to not only quickly search for data anywhere in the system, but also allow them to construct advanced searches based on almost any condition!

Furthermore, once the user has constructed a custom search they can then save this search and recall it later.  As only the search conditions are saved, and not the data itself, recalling the search will always return the most up-to-date data.

After implementing this model, the benefits became apparent very quickly. We found we were able to easily use it as a base of many other features in OMINS, a couple of which are outlined below.

Reporting:

Because they are built using the search functionality, we are able to quickly create or adjust reports as needed.  It also allows us to provide standard reports which can be further refined or expanded by the user based on almost any criterea he or she wants at any time – live!  The end result is a very powerful, system-wide reporting system.

For example: Want to see the profit report for all your products?  No problem.  What about just the products that are currently in stock?  Easy.  How about only products that sold in the last week of February?  Piece of cake.

Emails:

Once again, emails are made very powerful in OMINS thanks to the search functionality.  They can be constructed and sent out based on almost any event in the system!  This is accomplished by using a previously saved search (see above).

For example: A user could create a new saved search that found all customers in the system who have bought a product off TradeMe in the past week.  They can then create an email thanking those customers, attach this email to that saved search and schedule it to run weekly.  The end result is a simple “thank you” email going out automatically to all of your TradeMe customers.  Easy, but powerful.

A few further examples of emails provided standard in OMINS:

• Daily tracking number mailout for all sales sent that day.
• Scheduled payment reminders to customers who haven’t yet paid.
• If a previous customer has been bidding on or watching one of your TradeMe auctions, OMINS can send a link to that product on your website allowing the customer to buy it directly without waiting for an auction.
• Many more. 🙂

For the techies:

All of this powerful search functionality wouldn’t be possible without good infastructure to support it!  That’s why we built OMINS on enterprise-level software such as the MySQL database server.  This gives us infinately more power, performance and flexibility over entry-level software like Microsoft Access.

Of course, as we’ve said before, being web-based helps a great deal too. 🙂  Desktop software just doesn’t allow for the kind of flexibility or power needed to provide these features.

Summary

As you can see, by taking advantage of search we have been able to make OMINS both easy to use and very powerful.

Not an OMINS user?  Leave us a comment telling us how you manage your business data!