Pre-release fever: Manuel reveals his highlights in JTL-Wawi 1.7

Manuel has been on pins and needles for days. Now our Product Owner for JTL-Wawi can finally reveal what we at JTL have been working towards for many weeks – the stable release of JTL-Wawi 1.7! Find out in the interview which features you can look forward to and what was the focus of development this time.

Hi Manuel, I’ve heard that you’re planning another series of YouTube videos for our community. What’s behind it?

The stable release of JTL-Wawi 1.7 is in the starting blocks! March 1st is the day – merchants should make a note of the date in their calendars. In the YouTube videos, I offer users the opportunity to get to grips with the new features and functions step by step. I’m really looking forward to presenting the new possibilities in our ERP system.

Great! Can you give us a few highlights?

In addition to the innovations within JTL-Wawi, the stable versions of the JTL-Wawi app and the production tool JTL-Plan&Produce are also being released with 1.7. As the product owner for ERP, I can go into a little more detail about the new functions of JTL-Wawi.

With pleasure! There will be extra expert interviews on the other two solutions. What can we expect in JTL-Wawi in particular?

A lot has changed with the purchase order proposals. We now finally offer users the option of saving their settings in templates. This means I can configure different scenarios once and use them again and again to meet my requirements. In addition, we now work with relative time periods so that, for example, the time period for determining the requirement does not have to be entered again and again.

We also deliver two standard templates for frequently requested scenarios to make it easier for users to get started with the purchase order proposals. My personal highlight here is the integrated stock transfers. I can now use them to replenish my requirements from my own warehouses and optimally distribute stock. To do this, I simply have to define a warehouse instead of a supplier as the starting area.

This is a feature that we have again developed entirely with the community in the JTL forum – suggested by customers, co-developed, tested and approved!

What other new features are there?

We have made our own overviews even more dynamic. Since JTL-Wawi 1.6, you can display all possible data of a selected sales order based on SQL commands, e.g. all SKUs or items with a certain margin.

In 1.7, you now have the option of selecting several sales orders to display specific details. We have also implemented this feature in all areas of ERP. Whether in the invoices, items or listings – you can now use this function everywhere.

Can you give an example here?

Many users find the “Activity per platform” command very practical. It allows you to see at a glance which items are selling best on which marketplaces. With the new function, I can mark several items – e.g. T-shirts in all colors and sizes – and see how they perform together. To do this, I simply replace “= @Key” with “IN (@Keys)” in the SQL. @Key stands for the individual item and @Keys for all selected items. That’s all I need to know here.

Another popular use case: I select ten sales orders and have all the items they contain listed cumulatively, including weight information, so that I can adjust my shipping processes. The possibilities here are endless. Our merchants can already find countless overviews of their own for extending JTL-Wawi in the JTL forum.

What was particularly important to you when developing this version?

This time we have clearly focused on stability. The introduction of new features had less priority, as you can see when comparing the changes from version 1.5 to 1.6. 60 percent of the tickets that our developers worked on for 1.7 are quality optimizations.

The stable release of JTL-Wawi 1.7 was not long in coming.

Exactly, because we are planning to keep our update and discontinuation cycles between the different versions shorter in order to promote the stability of our solutions. However, we will provide users with more specific information on our new discontinuation and release cycles in due course.

However, we also made this decision in favor of user-friendliness: New functions are great at first glance, but you have to familiarize yourself with them first. That’s why we said this time: the jump from version 1.6 to 1.7 should be more moderate. This way, retailers can update in a more relaxed way and quickly find their way around the new functionalities.

Last but not least, IT security and system up-to-dateness are a decisive competitive factor in eCommerce, regardless of whether ERP or store systems are involved.