The 360° view
Everything connected to a record, on the record, with a way to add more without leaving it — and the same view for each line of a document, with a way back to where you started.
Open a customer and you are looking at a customer: a name, an address, a credit limit. What you usually want is the other thing — the quotations, the orders, the deliveries, the invoices, the payments, the returns, the cases, the contacts, the bank details, the contract. Every one of those used to be a separate screen, reached by remembering it existed and filtering it by hand.
The 360° panel sits under the header on every record page and answers three questions in the order people ask them.
| Section | What is in it |
|---|---|
| What it is made of | The master data this record names: the customer on an order, the item on a line, the cost centre on a requisition. One line each, each one a link. |
| What has happened to it | The documents that point at it, grouped by kind and in the order the chains are walked — quote, order, delivery, invoice, payment, return. The count is the whole truth; the rows under it are the most recent. |
| What it holds | The master data that hangs off it: addresses, contacts, bank accounts, price lists, sites. |
Adding from the panel
Every group with a create form behind it carries an Add button that opens that screen’s own form with the link back to this record already made. The whole cost of a related record used to be the walk: leave the customer, find the screen, start a record, find the customer again in a dropdown of four thousand. The rules, the numbering and the audit are the resource’s own — this only saves the walk.
- A group with nothing in it yet is still shown, with a count of 0 and + Add, where you may add one — so a new training course with nobody on it takes its first enrolment from here. A group you cannot add to and that has nothing in it is left out.
- A row with no number of its own is named by the person it is about: a course enrolment reads as the employee’s number and name, with its completion date rather than the day it was keyed in.
- The 360° view of a configuration’s resolved components, operations, inspections and cost sheet opens like any other (before 14 October it failed with an error).
Where the relationships come from
The database’s own foreign keys, read at start-up — not a list somebody maintains. A relationship added to the schema this week is in the panel this week, and there is no way for the panel to go quietly out of date.
A 360° view is never a way around a permission. Each related list is included only where you hold display on that screen too, so somebody who may see a customer and not its invoices sees the orders and no invoices — not even a count.
A card’s link opens its list filtered to this record, says so at the top, and offers Show all to take the filter away.
360° on a line
A quotation for two differently configured gauges has two bills of material and two routings, and the header can only list the configurations. So every line of every document grid — quotations, sales orders, purchase orders, requisitions, production orders and the rest — carries a 360° button. Press it and the line opens in a panel beside the grid, so you can compare it with the lines around it. The panel’s heading names the document and the line ("QT-000002 · line 1"), and a strip under it repeats the line’s item, quantity, unit price and amount.
| Tab | What it shows |
|---|---|
| Configuration | What was chosen for this line, question by question, with links to the configuration, its bill of material, its routing and any production order made from it. |
| Bill of material | The parts, per unit and for this line’s quantity. For a configured line it is the structure the configuration resolved to, with each part’s cost; for a plain item, the item’s current bill of material and its version. |
| Process | The operations in order, the work center of each, setup and run minutes, subcontracted and inspected steps, and the time for this line in total. |
| Cost | For a configured line: the cost per unit and for the line, the markup and the quoted price, and the cost build-up element by element. |
| Item | Stock on hand, allocated and available; the standard cost and list price; and a link to the item with its own 360° view. |
| Documents | The other documents whose lines carry the same item, grouped by kind, each with its status and date. |
| Linked records | The master data the line names — the item, the unit, the cost center and so on — each a link. |
- A tab with nothing behind it is not drawn. A plain stocked item with no bill and no routing shows Item and Documents, and that is all.
- A tab is shown only where you may open the screen it links to. A salesperson with no Manufacturing access sees the configuration’s answers — which are on the quotation line already — and not the shop’s routing or cost build-up; the panel says those are on screens your role does not include.
- Which line is open, and which tab, is kept in the page’s address. A link copied from it opens the same line on the same tab.
- Close shuts the panel. Opening a panel is not a step in your browser history, so Back does not merely close it.
A configured quotation line, level by level
On a configured quotation line, Bill of material shows the whole structure at every level: the product’s parts, each configurable sub-assembly, and the parts of each sub-assembly beneath it. It is shown as a preview while the configuration is still being worked out, so you can see what the line will be made of before it is resolved.
- An answer given on the product carries down to a configurable sub-assembly that asks the same question. Choose stainless steel for the gauge and a sub-assembly asking for its material is stainless steel too.
- A sub-assembly answered differently by hand keeps its own answer.
- Where the inheritance rule is locked, the parent’s answer always applies and the sub-assembly cannot be answered differently.
Back to where you started
Every number, part, work center and document in a 360° view is a link, and one leads to the next: the quotation line to its configuration, the configuration to a part, the part to the purchase order that last bought it. Four links in, the way back used to be pressing Back four times, or finding the quotation again from the menu with its panel shut and the page scrolled to the top.
Now every link out of a 360° view carries a trail. The screen it opens has a bar at the top: "‹ Back to QT-000002 · line 1", and, once you are more than one step in, a crumb for each step between.
- Back to returns to where you started — the same record, with the same line panel open on the same tab, scrolled to where you left it.
- A crumb returns to that step instead, for when you want the configuration again rather than the quotation.
- The browser’s own Back and Forward keep the trail, and so does reloading the page. A new browser tab does not inherit it.
- The bar appears only on a screen reached from a 360° view. Reached any other way, a screen has no bar.