C8 Systems has been designed to maximise user productivity by focusing on making it as simple and fast as possible to perform operations such as selling parts.

With advent of graphical operating systems such as Microsoft Windows, the computer mouse has become the primary mechanism which people use to nagivate a computer program.

A mouse is good for 'discovering' how software works – you can click around and sort of figure things out most of the time.

A mouse is no good though for repetitive operations that you perform over and over again. Beyond RSI (Repetitive Strain Injury) the key problem with a mouse is that using a mouse is significantly slower. For example, a user familiar with C9 and keyboard shortcuts can sell a single part in less than 5 seconds, where a mouse oriented DMS can take substantially longer than this.

C9  has designed many day-to-day functions in the software to be 100% accessible via the keyboard – we have even gone as far as counting the number of key strokes it takes to perform an operation to make the operation as efficient as possible. Taking time to learn how to use a keyboard can significantly speed up common tasks such as selling parts.

C9 defines the following keyboard 'gestures':

Key	Operation
Arrow Keys	In menus Arrow Keys allows you to move selected option up and down
Hot Keys	In menus – many menu's will have one letter underlined. e.g. Spare Parts. Press the 'P' key to automatically access that menu item.
Enter F10	On many screens, Enter Key (or F10 Key) is defined as the complete button. It is equivalent to hitting 'OK'
Tab	Tab key is standard Windows feature – move from one field to the next
F4	On screens with 'tab' options. F4 will allow you to toggle through available tabs. Windows defines Control+Tab for this – but Control+Tab is hard to remember and hard to use – so C8 defines 'F4' to mean the same thing. F4 is commonly also used to shortcut to lookup options for selecting different franchises etc.
Esc	Cancel, close current window.