AWS Lambda and API Gateway

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The following instructions are given that you have a lambda function created that works. AWS has API Gateway which enables developers to create RESTful API endpoints so people can call it and in turn run a lambda function. If you have never set up an API in API Gateway, you must:

  1. Log into the AWS console
  2. Search for “API Gateway” in the services tab
  3. Press “Create API”
  4. Choose REST / New API / assign a name to your api
  5. Once Created, add a resource to you api
  6. Create a method
  7. Add the created lambda function to the api resource

Once you have followed these steps the API Gateway will give you a url where you can call from your code and it will run your lambda function. One last thing you must do is to deploy the API. To do this, go to the resources tab of the API and click the Actions button and then click “Deploy”. Note that you may need to set up CORS if you want to secure your API.

5 ways CRM helps the small retailer

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Small business owners understand the importance of serving their customers. Small to mid-sized enterprises (SMEs) should look to customer relationship (CRM) systems to aid in their business dealings and customer relations. According to RetailCustomerExperience.com, a CRM can help your business better understand the needs and concerns and be more precise and deliberate in nurturing those relationships. Take retail, for example. With a CRM system in place, retaining purchase histories, tailoring a marketing strategy to a customer’s interests and retaining valuable information about a client’s wants and needs can all be done under one program. There are powerful features that can give your SME the competitive advantage and continue to grow. Here are 5 ways to use CRM systems:

  1. Improve customer service – One way to improve customer service this is through a CRM helpdesk ticketing system, which allows internal teams to prioritize customers where managers can assign accounts to team members.
  2. Track team efficiency – Most CRM solutions have an integrated field service management feature, which enables you to know what customers your sales representatives have visited with real-time tracking and check-ins.
  3. Manage inventory – SMEs that have inventory needs but lack internal resources can utilize a CRM to manage purchase orders, customer product orders, and even monitor all inventory in multiple warehouses.
  4. Make better decisions – SMEs, just like any other business, have many factors that impact the overall company performance and a business dashboard developed in a CRM presents these factors in easily understood data visualizations.
  5. See the whole company picture – Few CRMs available today also include Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software built into the solution. ERP is a powerful CRM addition that integrates all departments and functions across a business into a single system, while still serving each departments’ specific needs.

With proper implementation and guidance, CRMs can be the secret weapon your SME needs to stay competitive.

 

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Private Variables in Javascript

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If you are writing code and you want a user to manipulate data using methods you create but also don’t want the user to be able to manipulate data directly. One way you can go about this is through functional programming. Say you want to have an object that has the ability to move right and left with a starting position at 0. You might build out something like this:

const walker = {
    position = 0,
    right: function() {
        this.position++
    },
    left: function() {
        this.position–
    }
}

Then you call the function, walker.right() to move right and walker.left() to move left. However the way this is set up, a person can redefine the position variable by just directly changing it I.e. walker.position = 20. This is not good because the walker will be teleporting without ever hitting positions 1-19. So how do you stop a user from directly changing a variable that you don’t want them to change. An easy way to make this a private variable, is to make a function that return an object with only the method you want them to use. For example:

function walker() {
    let position = 0,
    return {
        right: function() {
            this.position++
        },
        left: function() {
            this.position–
        }
    }
}

const ben = walker()
ben.right()

I made a new variable called “ben” from the walker function. The way this is set up a user can no longer directly change the position property.

5 Ways To Give (Thoughtful) Thanks To Your Team

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When employees feel valued, they’re efforts and productivity increase. As a team member and leader, it’s important to take the time to recognize efforts and show your appreciation. Janet at Trello wrote a great article about how gratitude makes a positive impact on a person’s moral cognition, value judgement, and theory of mind and how this culture makes for a great work environment. Research show that a culture of gratitude is extremely important to motivate employees to do their best work and have a high level of job satisfaction. According to Janet, here are a few ways to show appreciation to your team.

  1. Provide Sincere And Consistent Recognition – Understanding how your team members like to accept gratitude can go a long way in showing that you truly care about their preferences.
  2. Give A Thoughtful Gift – If you can’t find the words, then give a great gift for that person on your team who deserves that recognition. Wrap that thanks with a bow and show them how grateful you are for their efforts at work.
  3. Get Your Team Involved – Employees feel valued when they can participate in decision-making and their skills are actually being used to the benefit of the company.
  4. Listen With Intent – The best leaders are the ones who take the time to really listen to their employees and colleagues.
  5. Create A Kudos Culture – At the end of the day, your team wants to feel appreciated and valued. This collective approach to expressing gratitude will help the practice become second nature to everyone on your team.

If you’re looking for ways to motivate your team, a simple “thank you” goes a long way.

 

Original Post by Janet Mesh at Trello

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Optimize Component Did Mount in React.js

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When using Reactjs, there are often times when you make a change to a database and need the updated data to be shown on the front-end. If you are taking advantage of the component did mount method to grab data once the page is mounted, you should move all of the code inside the component did mount to a new method so you can call the method once you make an update to your database. This will optimize your code since you wont be writing more code to grab the data once you make an update.

Fransen Gerrits Increases Efficiency and Optimizes Business Processes with Industry-Specific ERP

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Dutch animal feed producer Fransen Gerrits recently completed a successful upgrade of Infor M3 to help automate processes and streamline efficiency. Users of the M3 enterprise resource planning (ERP) solution since 2007, Fransen Gerrits has continually expanded its capabilities to meet the evolving needs of the food and beverage industry and its customers. By upgrading M3, with the support of Infor Alfa-Beta, Fransen Gerrits will benefit from new ways to optimize business processes and increase efficiency. The press release shared Fransen Gerrits’ financial director Jori Teuwen’s statement on their company’s commitment to Infor: “I keep up-to-date with suppliers like SAP and Microsoft to see what’s available in the market, but Infor M3 is the absolute winner for us thanks to the multi-country, multi-company, intra-company and multi-currency capabilities it provides, which I have not yet seen in other solutions. This is very important to us because we often deal with inter-company cashflows. In addition, the way the database is structured is better and makes it easy to facilitate any expansion abroad.” With Infor M3, Fransen Gerrits is able to record purchasing, production, sales and financial process and is surrounded by several third-party applications that either help save costs and/or improve productivity.

 

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AWS Lambda Sql Connection

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If you are creating a web app that uses lambda and a mysql database, there will be many times where you need to have sql information passing to and from lambda functions. A way to connect a lambda functions to a mysql database is using npm mysql. To set up the connection, there must be a connection variable defined. This variable must contain the mysql host name, user, password, and database. Once these are defined, the lambda function can connect to the mysql database with the code “connection.connect()”. Once this is ran, your lambda function can now run queries. These queries are written just like a regular sql query. Once you are done running your query make sure to declare your connection closed by stating “connection.end()”.

The process.env variables would be were you put your sql information.

 

**Note: You might need to configure your lambda function to be set up on the mysql database’s VPC.

Pataya Food Group Drives Expansion in Global Markets with Infor

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Thai seafood manufacturer and distributor Pataya Food Group has partnered with Infor to leverage Infor CloudSuite Food & Beverage (F&B), Infor OS and Infor Birst across its subsidiary companies and help accelerate business growth. This digitization plan allows Pataya Food Group’s expansion into global markets. The solution will be implemented by channel partner Lawson Software. Pataya Food Group is the leading shelf-stable seafood manufacturer and distributor in Thailand. Their commitment to quality has become recognized internationally. Apart from brands such as Nautilus, Sea Crown, Mongkut Talay and Regalos, its original equipment manufacturing (OEM) business has also established itself as supplying best-quality products. With this implementation, Pataya Food Group will be able to streamline operations in production and distribution, optimizing inventory management and supply chains with next-generation intelligent analytics. They will have the infrastructure to effectively manage product life cycle from factory to shelf for all brands across multiple regions with a centralized solution.

 

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Compiling Form Generates INVOKE Error

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If you are compiling a form that generates an error “Program X Does Not Allow INVOKE”, that means that the invoked program needs to be set to allow invoke. To do that, from a LID session, go to the form in pgmdef (pgmdef <prodline> <system code>). Select Define (F6) > Program (A).  Set the property “Can Be Accessed Via INVOKE” to Yes. Compile the invoked form and then compile the custom form that does the invoking.

Define (F6) > Program (A)

The Top 10 Technology Trends In Retail: How Tech Will Transform Shopping In 2020

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Technology is making its mark in just about every industry we know of. It helps create efficiencies, save money and provide better products and services. In retail for example, not only is technology making it easier for consumers to shop in store, online and on their mobile devices, but the softwares and processes are helping retail companies do business better. Strategic business & technology advisor Bernard Marr shared an article on Forbes predicting the top trends we might see in retail in 2020.

  1. Extended Reality – “Virtual and augmented reality offer retailers several ways to enhance the customer experience. From browsing products to virtually “trying them on,” extended reality is already in use by many retailers today such as Tilly’s, Ikea and Treasury Wines Estates. In the future, extended reality will eventually enable consumers to be able to share their virtual reality shopping experience with others.”
  2. Predictive Analytics (Big Data) – “Retail organizations have never had an issue collecting lots of data, but analyzing it and using the data to solve problems or create new solutions has been a struggle. Predictive analytics changes that. Now retailers can be proactive about the future by analyzing consumer behavior and trends from the past. Predictive analytics helps retailers be smarter, more efficient, and reduce costs.”
  3. Micro Moments – “Retailers who can meet customers “in the moment” have a powerful advantage. Thanks to direct digital access to consumers and powerful analytics capabilities, businesses can capture moments and help customers during their moment of need and even anticipate what a customer might need before they even know it.”
  4. Recommendation Engines – Another powerful tech tool for retailers is recommendation engines that help customers find things they never knew they needed and to help funnel options to a consumer at relevant times in their shopping journey. Retailers get to benefit from higher cart sales and improved customer satisfaction thanks to the ease of use. Amazon, Netflix, and Spotify are the recommendation engines you might be most familiar with, but many other retailers such as Best Buy use them too.
  5. Order Fulfilment Automation – “By the end of 2025, more than 580,000 autonomous mobile robots (AMR) will be deployed to help warehouses fulfill customer orders. Many retailers are scrambling to adjust to the “Amazon Effect” and are exploring order fulfillment automation to try to increase the speed and flexibility of operations in order to compete with Amazon. This automation can significantly reduce order processing times.”
  6. Face Recognition – “Many of the most successful retailers have online and offline presences. Facial recognition technology helps retailers proactively battle shoplifting and retail crime. In addition, it can bring the personalized online shopping experience to the brick-and-mortar location. When a customer is identified through facial recognition technology, the store staff can better respond to that customer’s unique needs.”
  7. Stock Management – “Automated warehouses help improve inventory control. Rather than wait for manual inventories, smart robotics and computer systems keep reliable stock data in real-time. This accurate data helps retailers manage stock flow, make solid predictions, smart decisions, and forecasting that help improve the store’s bottom line.”
  8. Robotic Store Assistants – “Another tech trend that’s changing shopping is robotic store assistants. Robots can help shoppers find the merchandise they are looking for and answer questions. They can even email special offers or coupons. Lowe’s has the LoweBot that helps with in-store customer service.”
  9. Customer Chat Bots – “There has been rapid adoption of messaging-based customer service bots across retail. Messaging has become the preferred customer service channel, so call volume will be reduced. Artificial intelligence bots will be able to improve the customer journey pre- and post-sales by lowering cart abandonment and help customers solve problems after the sale without human intervention.”
  10. Internet of Things (IoT) and Smart Equipment – “The Internet of Things and smart equipment will transform the shopping experience. Thanks to the volumes of data we have available and the ability to process it, consumers can receive a personalized shopping experience that wasn’t possible before. Today’s consumers want experiences that include personalization and information to help them make decisions.”

 

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