Business Intelligence Shop (Bishop)
Bishop, which stands for Business Intelligence Shop, is an application designed for manufacturing job-shops. It provides such businesses with clear, fast, easy to use, easy to navigate, efficient access to a database that keeps precise track of:
- Current and past jobs that can be further subdivided into individual job items.
- Quotes that can be converted into jobs.
- Time spent by the employees on specific job items performing specific operations.
- External vendor purchase orders associated with the jobs.
- Scrap events that take place during the manufacturing process.
- Shipments both to customers and to external vendors.
- Documents, incl. drawings and other documentation associated with jobs, quotes and vendor purchase orders.
- Information about shop employees, customers and external vendors.
In addition to the quick and convenient access to all that information, Bishop provides tools for printing shipping labels, shipment packing slips, cover sheets, official quotes, purchase orders, etc. It also provides various reports that allow the shop officers and managers to get insight into the job costs, execution efficiency and time spent. Easy access to the past jobs information allows the businesses to come up with accurate quotes for the new jobs giving them competitive advantage while minimizing the risks of running over budget.
As an application, Bishop is implemented using modern technologies. On the user interface side, or the front end, it is a “single page” application that runs in a web browser and uses Google’s AngularJS framework. On the server side, or the back end, it uses Boyle Software’s own Thymes2 Java framework backed with an open source relational database. The back end normally runs in a cloud environment, such as the Amazon Cloud. The back end exposes a RESTful API and the front end talks to it over the Internet via an encrypted HTTPS protocol. The use of the Thymes2 framework provides outstanding application performance and reliability with the minimal requirements for the computational resources, which minimizes the application hosting costs for the business. The use of the cloud environment provides great level or the software availability, durability and security.
Bishop Architecture
