Do not forward this

A few days ago I was asked to organize a document that detailed why a certain partner of ours was having problems. and how we could fix those problems for them. The problem we've been having is that their system seems to have some serious limitations and we are trying to work around it. I have no idea what exactly they have in their back end other than they use ASP (no, not .NET, VBScript) and the relationship has turned sour because we keep asking for more information and there doesn't seem to be any more. Let me remind you, the report I was asked to write was completely made up. I wear various hats here at the office and today I had to wear my "I wonder what they could possibly be running on their side and how can we ask them to fix it with minimum amount of impact to their development resources" hat. The information I had was quite limited:

Medium size companyTheir products that need to be shippedThey take orders onlineApproval of orders may take up to 48 hours

The problems we were facing were quite simple:

Reporting is cumulative ( x orders yesterday, no details or timestamps)No way to differentiate between ordersThey seem to be having a hard time to make these reports

I immediately started thinking how I would make this system work if I had to build it from scratch. There has to be a way that you can identify the users because you need to know who to ship the product to, and there also needs to be a way to contact the users who's credit cards didn't work so you can re-market to them.For their purposes they needed a reporting system that allowed at least for these three things:

Clean order data for marketing purposes ( x products sold in the last y hours!)Detailed order data for advertising partners ( sale x at this time was prompted by y partner with parameters z)Sales only data for fulfillment ( ship x product to y address)

They were missing a way to give detailed information to the advertising partners in a way that did not give personal information to the advertising partner and also allowed the advertising partner to see if their campaigns were working or not. There also seems to be no way to add this functionality anytime soon which makes things quite complicated. In my report I expressed the lack of these flexibilities would essentially make their system a Straw Shuttle, an idea, that while makes sense if you don't see the whole picture, is fundamentally flawed. Now we have a lot to work with them on, to get this reporting working for everyone, or had, since somebody forwarded the email and they didn't quite care for my comparison of their 'technology' to a Straw Shuttle. No more linking to The Onion stories on my email reports, understood.