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| Minotaur Welcomes New Customer |
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City Bread and Sons Bakery - City Bread, located in Winnipeg, Manitoba manufacture and distribute a variety of fresh and par baked breads and buns for food service and major retailers. Sons Bakery located in Calgary, Alberta and Brampton, Ontario manufacture buns and bread for distribution throughout Canada. For information on their products, please contact City Bread at 204-586-8409, Sons Bakery Brampton at 905-458-0388 and Sons Bakery Calgary at 403-252-3660. |
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Minotaur exhibited at the 2010 Bakery Showcase held at The International Centre May 16-18th. |
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New This Year
10 Minute New Product Presentations were held each morning. A presentation on Simplifying Lot Traceability—A One System Approach was presented by Wendy Pineo on Sunday May 16th. To view this presentation, visit the videos page on our website at http://www.minotaursoftware.com/videos.htm |
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We enjoyed the show and spoke with a number of Minotaur customers such as Shannon from La Siembra
Co-operative (bottom-left) and fellow exhibitor, EggSolutions. |
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| Training |
Ongoing user training is an ideal way to ensure your staff are working as efficiently as possible and are taking advantage of all the Minotaur system has to offer. Customers report that having Minotaur spend a 1/2 day training new employee’s is very helpful in getting staff up and running quickly and ensuring they are introduced to the many benefits the system has to offer.
MBS7 highlights training for those customers who have upgraded to the latest MBS7 version can be beneficial to ensure staff are aware of new functionality such as the improved Excel integration and emailing of PDF documents.
As always, training can be done at your location, remotely or as hands on training in our on site training facility.
If you would like to discuss your training options, please contact your project manager. |
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INSIDE THIS ISSUE |
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Flexible Reports - Level 1 |
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| Whether you are creating an email list, wanting quick access to specific information or are writing your own report, the flexible report writer can be a very powerful tool. Unlike the sales report writer which accesses the sales journal, the flexible report writer enables those with the appropriate security to write reports based on any data within their Minotaur system. As the flexible report writer does require the user be familiar with tables and using common fields to link one table of data to a related table, we offer 3 levels of flexible report writer training. |
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| During level 1 training, we will review table structures and begin to explore how your data is stored. We will review the concepts for generating reports and practice creating simple list reports based on some sample data in addition to beginning to learn how to bring in data from additional tables. |
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| The course will be held on Tuesday June 22nd from 9am to 12pm and is open to all Minotaur users. The cost of the course is $100 per person. To register, please contact our summer student, Romana, at 905-458-7575 or email romana@minotaursoftware.com. |
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| Unable to attend in person? We are pleased to offer our out of the GTA customers the option to take any of our training courses remotely. In order to be able to take the course remotely you will need access to 2 computers, both with internet access. The first will be used to see the instructor’s screen and the second for the hands on portion which will allow you to do the activities in our demo system. |
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| Remote connections are limited so if you are interested in taking this course remotely make sure to register early to ensure a spot. |
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Do you need more fields to store information about your
items, customers or employees? |
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| Perhaps Item Attributes, Customer Attributes or Employee Attributes are the answer. Attribute functionality enables you to add additional user defined fields to your master files and store static information in the form of text, numeric, date and yes/no flags. |
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You might store information about the dimensions of your finished goods cases, default pick location or allergen information on the item master, employee’s anniversary or spouse’s name in the employee master and owner’s name, closest intersection, etc on the customer master. Attribute information can be pulled into reports or forms and can be used for filtering when running various Minotaur built-in reports.
If you are interested in adding attribute functionality to your system, please call your project manager. |
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| Struggling to Understand Barcodes? |
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Different barcodes are used for different purposes. Often a UPC barcode will be used on retail packages so that the system recognizes the product when it is scanned. While that is certainly helpful, when it comes to traceability and needing to track what lots of product were shipped to which customer for instance, a UPC code does not provide enough information.
- First digit = Application No.; identifies the type ie. 0=grocery
- Next 10 digits = unique number that identifies both the manufacturer and the item
- Lasts digit = check digit
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Code 128 is a high intensity barcode that is a segment barcode where the different segments can contain different information. The above GS1-128 is a typical barcode for a meat company.
- 01 = identifies type of barcode.
- Next 14 digits = identifies whether this is a variable weight item or a skid or a case of a fixed weight item plus the manufacturer and item code.
- 11 = production or packed on date follows. Some suppliers will also use this field as the expiration date.
- 3102 = weight follows. 31 is for kg. 02 is 2 decimals.
- 21 = serial or lot number follows.
When product is labeled with 128 barcodes, cases can be scanned and shipped capturing lot/serial information and case weight where applicable. When catch or random weight products are sold such with meat or cheese companies, a unique serial number is used in order to identify the exact case and therefore weight of the case. For fixed weight product, often a lot number is used such that the barcode on each case of the same product and lot, will have identical barcode labels. |
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| Sleeping Children Around the World Fundraising Breakfast |
| Judith, Wendy and Kathy attended the annual fundraising breakfast along with Minotaur customers and partners, International Time Recorder, Richvale York and Real Time Communications. Minotaur customer, Macgregor’s Meat and Seafood introduced us to this wonderful Canadian 100% Charity. 2010 marked the distribution of the one millionth bed kit to a child in need. Our congratulations to the many volunteers on reaching this milestone. The goal is to provide another million bed kits within the next 10 years. To find out how you can help, please visit www.scaw.org. |
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Thank you to Minotaur Supplier GTAA for their generous product donation to the breakfast. |
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Summer Word Search |
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Summer time is here!
Find all the words in our summer word search for a chance to win! |
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| Solve our Summer time word search and be eligible for your chance to win a $25 gift card to Canadian Tire. |
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In celebration of our 25 years of excellence, we will have two winners each newsletter contest in 2010. |
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Fax your entries to 905-458-5585 or email to romana@minotaursoftware.com by
June 12, 2010.
Name: _______________________ Company: _____________________ |
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| OIMP Members April Workshop |
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| At an OIMP workshop in April, Judith Kirkness of Minotaur Software and Paul MacDonald of Real World Communications (Minotaur’s Hand Held Hardware partner) shared with members ideas for Simplifying Lot Traceability and Understanding Labels and Barcode Scanning. For more information on managing traceability and scanning in your facility, please contact Judith Kirkness or Wendy Pineo at Minotaur Software at 905-458-7575. For information on hand held hardware models and pricing, Paul MacDonald can be reached at (905) 405-6222. http://www.realworldcom.com |
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Congratulations to April’s
Contest Winner |
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Congratulations to Joe Giulitto of Richvale York Block Inc. for winning April's contest. Joe joined Judith, Wendy and Kathy at the Sleeping Children Around the World (SCAW) annual Pinehurst Club fundraising breakfast held at the Royal York on May 5th. Over $110,000 was raised that day.
Joe has been the Controller at Richvale York for over 10 years and enjoys gardening and video games in his spare time.
Richvale York manufacture and sell concrete block to contractors as well as to the public. They have 3 locations in Ontario - Kingston, London and Gormley and have been a Minotaur customer since 1989. |
| We hope you enjoy your gift! |
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| Date Effective HST |
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| If you haven’t reviewed your existing HST functionality, now is the time. As announced in late April, Minotaur is offering a date effective HST configuration which will allow you increased flexibility when editing pre July 1st dated transactions after you have updated Ontario to be an HST province.
If this is a feature you are interested in purchasing, just sign the memo you received and fax back to Minotaur. If you have any questions, please call your Project Manager.
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| The information in this newsletter is provided to customers to use at their own risk. It is not intended as a substitute for professional advice. |
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