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Warehouse Order Guide

The Warehouse Order Guide, or WOG, is the legacy predecessor to SmartPO - a purchase order creation app that stores used to order from the internal Three Bears Alaska warehouse. It is still live today, but only as a read-only reference; no store places purchase orders through it anymore.

Overview​

The Warehouse Order Guide is a purchase order creation app. Store staff used it to build and submit POs, but only for orders going to the internal Three Bears Alaska warehouse.

It is a PHP application hosted on the FortisureIT Azure tenant, originally built in Power Apps and later converted to PHP.

Today it functions as a read-only resource for PICs. No store is able to place a purchase order through it, so its only remaining value is as a reference.

  • Repository: Client-Threebears-Store-Order-App
  • Stack: PHP (originally Power Apps)
  • Hosting: FortisureIT Azure tenant, under the 'ThreeBearsAlaska' resource group
  • Used by: Store staff placing orders - PICs today, read-only
  • Vendors supported: Internal Three Bears Alaska warehouse only
  • Current use: Read-only reference for PICs

How It Works​

WOG produced its purchase orders as Word documents, generated from a template file. That template handled the print formatting - it numbered each page and fit the items being purchased into a table.

With SmartPO, that table structure is handled by an Excel file today. Formatting has since been added to the new Excel documents to reproduce what the Word template used to give us, adding page numbers and page breaks on printing the document.

Relationship to SmartPO​

SmartPO is the successor to WOG, and covers everything WOG did plus external vendors and predictive ordering. With the addition of CEs to SmartPO, SmartPO is believed to cover the last of what WOG was still relied on for.

See Retirement below for where that stands.

Data & Tables​

A collection of database views are used exclusively by WOG. Because nothing else reads them, they can be cleaned up alongside the application whenever it is retired.

These views have not been catalogued yet. They all culminate in the getItemList stored procedure, and likely the OrderGuide table as well, so those are the two jumping off points for tracing the full list.

Access & Permissions​

WOG authenticates with direct Microsoft logins rather than Firebase. This is a difference worth knowing about when comparing it to Smart Tools Hub, which handles its authentication through Firebase backed by the Microsoft tenant.

Each store has its own Microsoft account rather than individual accounts per employee. The store number appears in both the email address and the surname on the account.

There is also a selection of back office accounts and a warehouse-specific account. These are not used to log into WOG - they only receive the purchase orders it sends.

Retirement​

Status: proposed, not agreed. Retiring WOG has not yet been discussed with Mike Zuyus, and no decision has been made. Nothing below should be acted on until that conversation happens.

The case for retiring it is that no store places orders through it, SmartPO now appears to cover everything it was still used for, and its Azure resources carry an ongoing cost for an application that is only serving as a reference.

Proposed Approach​

Before anything is deleted, we would want to be very sure no one is still using it:

  • Confirm with Three Bears Alaska that nobody depends on it as a reference
  • Shut the application off for a period first, leaving the resources in place, so any issue has a chance to surface before anything becomes irreversible
  • Only delete the resources once that period passes cleanly

Resources to Remove​

Everything in the 'ThreeBearsAlaska' resource group on our Azure tenant belongs to WOG, so the whole group should be able to go once the application is fully retired:

ResourceTypeLocationNotes
WarehouseOrderGuideApp ServiceWest USThe application itself
App-ThreeBearsAlaskaApp Service planWest USThe plan the app runs on
FIT-Threebears-Email-Sender-1.00Logic appEast USSends the Word template emails, used exclusively by WOG
office365-1API connectionEast USBacks the Logic app
onedriveforbusinessAPI connectionEast USBacks the Logic app
wordonlinebusiness-1API connectionEast USBacks the Logic app
wordonlinebusiness-2API connectionEast USBacks the Logic app
TBA_SOC2Action groupGlobalThe notification target the alert rule fires into - most likely its email recipient list
TBA_SOC2Metric alert ruleGlobalAppears to alert on expenses for a resource that is no longer in the group

Note that a separately created Logic App with a similar name exists on the Three Bears Alaska tenant, where it serves part of the email sending flow. It is a different resource and is not affected by retiring WOG - see Logic Apps.

Both TBA_SOC2 resources are potentially left over from a SOC 2 compliance effort we no longer pursue, and are almost certainly safe to delete. Worth a quick look at what the alert rule is scoped to first, since alert rules can watch resources in other groups, but nothing is expected to come of it.

The database views used exclusively by WOG sit outside this resource group and would be cleaned up separately. See Data & Tables above.

Known Issues & Limitations​

  • Internal warehouse only - POs could only be placed against the internal warehouse, never external vendors
  • No predictive ordering - it has none of the suggestion logic SmartPO provides
  • Ongoing cost - its Azure resources continue to bill while it stays live
Last updated on by Zach Sedlack