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Inventory Tracking & Purchasing
nimr0d writes "I work for a company is subcontracted entirely to the county government. We write the software in-house. We have approximately 100 different locations we service, and don't expect that to change much, for better or for worse. Currently, we have an archaic, DOS-based, ICOBOL inventory system which tracks every piece of digital equipment we have, by a individually unique serial number, which is further tracked by a 'SystemID', which is a container for each individual workstation. We then have another container for the location where the equipment resides. We currently track around 30,000 individual parts. Problem is, our system is very bug-ridden and is constantly prone to 'losing' equipment. We desperately need a new system for PO's, RA's, and inventory/cost/depreciation tracking desperately. Does anyone have any advice?"
"We need to be able to ship an exact copy of the system we originally sold them, in the event of a failure. Some stations serve different functions, so the ability to classify system's and parts by type is also very helpful. We also currently have flags for leased or purchased equipment, and whether that part is covered under warranty or not.
We have looked into several companies that write custom software, but they are looking for upward of $35,000 for a SQL or Access application, which is insane for a company of our size (approximately 25 people) to buy into. There has to be something out there reasonably priced that can do what we need it to, we can't be the only ones."
We have looked into several companies that write custom software, but they are looking for upward of $35,000 for a SQL or Access application, which is insane for a company of our size (approximately 25 people) to buy into. There has to be something out there reasonably priced that can do what we need it to, we can't be the only ones."
You could probably manage your inventory with:
I'm not being totally facetious. Usually the problem is overkill with managing information. If it's low transaction (sounds like yours is), with minimal dynamics, I've seen so many sledgehammer applications that are exactly what you describe: buggy, with data constantly "lost".
The tools I listed won't keep stuff from getting lost, but software doesn't do that. Good management and procedures around your inventory will. What it'd cost you to assign one person to manage a reasonably simple solution would be way more than offset the cost of expensive or custom software.
This really is feasible, I've done this myself. Heck, from what you describe, I'd offer to put it together for you, write the on-line help, and get you going. I'd venture I could put together a working app in three or four days.
Again, not trying to be facetious, just consider looking more closely at your procedures and policies. Good luck, we're counting on you!
http://www.openpro.com/
I'd say right a little database frontend in perl and query a mysql database. It's cheap (as in free), mysql runs on MS and Linux(free) and Linux can handle more hits and abuse than MS. Hell, if you run Linux you don't even need bleeding edge machinery.
If you want to get pretty with it you can make it web page based using php. And you even use Vbasic to run it if you're stuck on a MS box.
That which does not kill me only postpones the inevitable.
And obviously you can't beat the price of FOSS. Plus the support is very reasonably priced as well.
I only mod funny =D
Have you bothered to check Freshmeat or Sourceforge for projects similar to yours? I've been looking for a Point of Sale system, and many of the freely available software systems to something similar to what you ask. The rest is just finding a contract programming team (check your local LUG) to customize the package.
Freshmeat
SourceForge
echo
"We desperately need a new system for PO's, RA's, and inventory/cost/depreciation tracking desperately. Does anyone have any advice?" Uh-huh, never use the same word in the same sentence twice.
Wherever you go, there you are.
Asset Tracker, a system which integrates wonderfully with Request Tracker is worth looking at, definitely. It has something of a learning and configuration curve, to be sure. Once you're over that, though, it works like a charm. Oh, and the price is right, too: Free.
GPL made simple: What was my stuff is now our stuff. If you improve our stuff, please keep it our stuff.
Build yourself a database in-house if possible. You can put together a basic one to fit what seem to be your needs with a relatively small amount of work. Tables for location data, system/location concordance, system data (role, etc), part/system concordance, part data (role, manufacturer, model), and something to tie a serial number to a specific machine and part (since you will presumably have multiple pieces of equipment with the same model number) should get you pretty well covered.
Then you just need to write a front-end that will pull the necessary data out, and you can even have it prepare orders automatically from simply putting in the ID of a failed machine.
www.netsuite.com
Scott
Don't take me for a troll, but I'd like to politely say that this seems like a rather inane question to make the front page of Slashdot. After all, anyone who has taken a programming class has been made to write software like this as a gentle, easy introduction to programming. Naturally, this is a real-world problem that is a bit larger and more complex than simple practice problems (ie larger data set, possible need for network code), but the fundamental idea is very similar.
The fact that the original system was written in COBOL and ran on DOS is a little telling. Back when my father used to work for Radioshack, he coded an inventory transaction system in BASIC in his spare time, and it was used by quite a few of their shops. His programming experience is quite modest, and he's always been more of a user than a coder.
My point being this: You can produce this software in-house a lot more effectively than by seeking an outside solution. Other people may have written programs (or systems of programs) that do what you want, but they aren't tailored specifically for your company. Also, I imagine that it would be a lot cheaper (sure, there is freeware, but somebody still has to work on it to make it fit).
Produce DETAILED requirements of ALL the processes that need to be performed and all the reports that are required of the system.
Step 2.
Determine what each part of the application is worth to you. How much business would you lose without it, how much easier would your job be if the software did it for you.
Step 3.
Find any existing products free or otherwise.
Step 4.
Compare the features against your requirements.
Step 5.
Offer to pay someone to implement those feature you want, that the software doesn't have. Possibly the original vendor / author of the software or for free software you could offer the job to someone internally if they're up to it, or well anyone really.
Step 6.
Look at what you've now got, realise that it's totally unworkable, just a buggy if not more so as the last software you used, and pay the $35k to someone else who works in the industry and knows what they are doing to sort out the mess.
Here's some free advice. Getting software to work exactly the way you want can be quite complicated and costly. Don't underestimate it.
09F91102 no, 455FE104 nope, F190A1E8 uh-uh, 7A5F8A09 that's not it, C87294CE no. Ah! 452F6E403CDF10714E41DFAA257D313F.
I'd like to suggest looking into OFBiz http://www.ofbiz.org/ - it's not meant precisely for what the OP wants, but it's sufficiently flexible to be programmed/configured to do that sort of work without problems. The database models it's based on are very well thought out, something that 'rolling your own' is likely to not get quite right the first few times.
http://www.welton.it/davidw/
My advice would be to gank all the good gear you can before they bring in someone who knows what they're doing.
I see this problem ALL the time. I talked about it in the thread about hotel check-in software too.
There is a general lack of good quality easy to use software out there and most of that runs over windows, which means you not only have to teach your staff how to use windows in addition to the software, you have to BUY windows and then deal with all the problems that windows brings with it.
My friend worked at a warehouse that had some horrible antiquated made for them text based system, where each keystroke was sent a couple of countries away to Denmark (of all places) and back. It was incredibly slow. The only improvement over the years was to transfer things from a museum piece green screen client to running in a window in windows NT (after that, not only did the software suck, so did winNT).
What the software did was relatively simple and could have been implemented as say a browser based database or some such, but that would have required actually spending money and time one it.
This system could have been run on top of Linux (no weekly re-boot) and would have saved them that money too.
What this world needs is more smart people.
Some say he is made with ascii, others that he is eyeballed daily by millions. All we know is, he is known as the Sig
http://tinyerp.com/
Any IT project got to run at least a year (planned) go overtime by at least a year. Go at least 2 million over budget. Not deliver what is required. Require that whatever the software does it cannot do it well or at all for at least half a year after it has been rolled out.
What the above ain't law? Then why do the same IT companies that screw up time and time again get the contract time and time again? Surely people ain't that stupid?
I did do a bit of work for goverment (non-it) and did some tools for them (for free I hate doing warehousing with paper). Two web apps for inventory tracking. Nothing important, just a timesaver. Ran fine until some manager came by and decided that all IT had to come from the IT supplier (Roccade, the dutch supplier of over-budget over-time bugware). It never emerged and we dealt with it by moving the PC's to a location were they were less noticable.
Don't know if it is still there.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
FAS Website
The big boys in the facilities management arena (MP2 and Maximo) can often be leased. For example, my employer, hosts Maximo for an annual fee that is far smaller than what you would pay for buying the licenses directly from MRO. And we're not the only ones.
If you were thinking in spend $35.000 to get an specific app, you will be happier if you need to spend a lot less ... :)
Take a look at http://tinyerp.com/ if does everything you want and a lot more, maybe you will find it interesting. Yes it is an almost full featured ERP+CRM but the stock modules are pretty complete. They have the multiwarehouse you need, the backtrack and some aditional niceties.
You can use too http://compiere.org/, but from my experience with both packages, Compiere is heavier, harder to configure and uses Oracle, TinyErp uses postgresql is writen in python and is very easy to get a test bed working.
Hope it helps you
Have a look at Compiere ERP. I haven't used it, but it's a very active project on Sourceforge, and it's free.
Check out http://www.dbsonline.com/ and have a look at their BS/1 products. I've used them in the past and found them to be of exceptional quality. The part that I like best is that, yes, the BS/1 series is closed source, BUT, you can buy the source at a reasonable price. This is some very popular code that is used in a variety of industries, easily customized, and may meet your needs too.
All you need is some delphi experience.
[Disclaimer: no, I am not affiliated with the company, just a satisfied user]
pi=sigma{n:0-infinity}[(1/16)^n][(4/(8n+1))-(2/(8n +4))-(1/ (8n+5))-(1/(8n+6))]
Our company has been using Accpac advantage series modules for five years. Modules relevant to your question, inventory control, purchase orders, and order entry, although I am quite sure you would require others like payables, etc.
We have 5 years experience with it and it has performed rock solid. It is now called sage pro, http://sageproerp.com/
Modules run from $1500-3000 cdn, but they always seem to offer new user specials quarterly, discounting their products 25-50%
The software should not set you back $35000. My setup ran our company $15000, but we are talking 5 years ago.
Good luck!
I think everyone here who has a programming degree is rolling their eyes. This is a no-brainer:
1. Find and hire a young CS student
2. Pay them well for the summer
3. Discuss exactly what you want the software to do for you
4. Watch the kid build it in record time before your eyes
5. Give them a 1000$ bonus in the end and enjoy the app.
Seriously, this sort of app is the every programming student's first major project. Most "custom business solutions" are basically the exact same thing, but with a glorified interface and extensive, bullshit-ridden documentation to please the bean counters. Let's face it, at least 75% of "business solutions" involve storing all your customer/product/service/billing data and retrieving it later as you need it, then running stats on the aggregate data to help streamling your business processes. It's all just a database with input dialogs and reporting facilities.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
Seriously. You don't need a white-hot performance-optimizing programmer, because nothing you're doing is going to tax the system resources of a Pentium II, even with _fairly_ inefficient code (as long as none of the algorithms it uses are worse than about O(n log n).) What you do need is somebody who understand the importance of robustness, and that's not nearly as hard to hire, or as expensive. Your existing solution is so archaic and so bad, any decent computer geek will be able to put together something you can live with in a matter of a couple of months, and then you'll have various improvement requests over the next year or so after that.
Just make sure, before you let the programmer start writing any code, that you explain to him all the important features of your existing software, how they work, and why you need them.
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
I do IT work for a small to medium distribution buisness and we are updating out ERP/CRM application. So far we are looking at the folowing solutions:
VAI
Good luck, we are just finishing up coming up with our needs requirements and that was a pain in and of its self.Net Suite
Intuit Eclipse
Tech Sys
Infor
Activant
I have a CS degree from the University of Rochester. I worked on a bunch of mentally challenging, but low paying research / robotics projects after college. It was very 'hard' CS work, but I wanted a car, so I got a high paying job in business.
Now, I program a huge order entry system in COBOL.
The problem isn't that writing an order entry system is hard; there's nothing technically difficult about it. The problem is that the order entry system a lot of businesses use has been in place for 50 years. So you aren't writing it from scratch.
That wouldn't even be that hard .... if COBOL was an object oriented language.
Sadly, there is no standard for object oriented COBOL, and so the code you end up working with is absolute spaghetti. The code base is so big that you can't go back and re-engineer the entire system. In fact, you can't even trace the execution of single program, much less the interaction of the hundreds of programs that your order entry system relies on.
Because of the sheer size of the problem (read: legacy code), and because programmers are always under tight deadlines, the goal of programmers in these situations is just to get the code working and get it in there. There isn't time to make it perfect. There just isn't.
So the problem just gets worse and worse and worse until ....
There are better companies/projects/systems out there. There ARE well-organized order entry systems and I'm sure that somewhere, there are programmers that have well-defined specifications. But in the world of business, where the bottom line is the most important thing, coding can be a much bigger headache than you might realize.
burrocrisy
and that would be what? Ruling by jackasses? Never has a slashdot misspelling been more apropos
I'll throw down with Quasar.
It has a few more features than you're looking for, but it does inventory tracking pretty well.
It's also GPL'ed.
Ask a reseller near you for a demo CD with a sample or blank database. They cripple it by limiting the number of times you can connect to the database (hundreds of times) so you can freely evaluate the product.
We write the software in-house.
Why not write the software in-house?
Don't think that a small group of dedicated individuals can't change the world. It's the only thing that ever has.
I've just started a new company Kangaroo Software, LLC that is offers a product similar to what you're asking for: KangarooTrax. It has invoicing, inventory, purchase orders, and customer management built in. The company is new, but the software has been around for a few years.
You may be more interested in the fact that it's built on MySQL and has an open architecture that can integrate into whatever applications your build in-house or drag around for historical reasons.
We're in beta testing right now, but feel free to take a look at our web site: http://www.kangaroosoftware.com/. I apologize for the incomplete state of the web site, but, like I said, we're just getting off the ground.
http://www.sql-ledger.org/
It has inventory control.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
The software is only part (50%) of the cost. You need to migrate all the old data over (this is ALWAYS expensive). You need to train people in the new system. You need to host the software on the right hardware and back it up daily - and be able to roll back at least 30 days.
Custom software is great because you can tweak to get exactly what you want. The problem is finding a guru to make it for you - also it can be difficult to get them back 2 years down the track when you want an update.
Off the shelf software is good becuase you can get updates as software and hardware moves on. For buying off the shelf it is important to get software that really will be supported in 10 years time.
Replacing CORE software is a really great way to get big efficiency gains. You guys use the software all day every day - if you can save an hour or 2 a day over 20 years then that is worth heaps of money, maybe a better system will help you service you clients better - give them a new report, maybe it can integrate with sales and improve sales, maybe with new software you could open a new business channel or make a business channel effictive.
Replacing a core system needs a champion (sounds like you) - talk to EVERYONE in the company - build the business case - do it - if you make the right choice and it works brilliantly every one will think your a champion for the next 20 years and no-one will care how much it cost.
I am a longtime programmer using Icobal.. I dont understand the problems you could be having running your system on this platform. ICobal is by far the application out their for this type of application. I have learned from my expierience that it is more likly to be USER error in inputing the data rather than an application problem. It would be my guess that your errors in imputing the data is what is causing it to seem buggy... Maybe you should take a class on ICobal so you could learn to understand the power it holds. The answer to fixing your inventory system obviouslly lies with you...!!!
Dear nimr0d I work for a large company and our inventory system is also based in ICOBOL a very powerful programing language if not the most powerful know to man at this time. After reading over your post its really sounds like HUMAN error so either you need to fire the idiot that runs the inventory or learn/teach someone how to use the system rigth. Again you can not blame ICOBOL or any DOS based system from what i can see its HUMAN error. WE have been running our inventory system now for about 20 years. Let me give you the history behind ICOBOL and why its is the best and always will be the best 1977 Data General introduced the first minicomputer-based COBOL, called Interactive COBOL. The first system was the CS/40 system, which ran 1 to 3 users on a Nova 4 minicomputer. It ran on a custom version of the RDOS operating system called ICOS (Interactive Cobol Operating System). This product line was augmented over the years with the microNova-based CS/10 model on the low end, and the Eclipse-based CS/60 and CS/70 models on the high end. The number of users on a system climbed to 33. 1982 -- ICOBOL 1 Data General announced a new generation of Interactive COBOL software that ran on the Eclipse (16-bit) and MV/Eclipse (32-bit) machines and used the standard DG operating systems of the time (RDOS, AOS, and AOS/VS). This product became known as ICOBOL 1. This move was significant in that it introduced an unprecedented portability of application code and data from one platform to another. Over the years this product line also included the MP/OS operating system on the microEclipse, RDOS and AOS on the Desktop Generation series, and even a version that ran on MS-DOS on the DG/One. The user count boundaries were extended upward once more to include hundreds of users on an MV/Eclipse. 1986 With the advent of the 32-bit Intel microprocessors, the three founders of Envyr Corporation left Data General with a vision to carry the application portability one step further - into the world of the personal computer based on Intel processors. 1987 -- ICHost Envyr Corporation released its first product, called ICHost, which stood for Interactive COBOL Host. It was an add-on to Data General's single-user Interactive COBOL runtime for MS-DOS that extended its capability to run up to 9 terminals. It is also in 1987 that Envyr was acquired by Egan Systems. Over the next few years we built replacement components for all of DG's Interactive COBOL product except the compiler. The runtime system technology was also expanded to use multiple Intelligent Multiplexor cards to offload runtime processing and terminal handling from the main processor. This produced a highly scalable system and expanded the upward limits of the MS-DOS based systems to 65 users. 1990 We introduced our own COBOL compiler, severing that final dependency our customers had on Data General. We also expanded our operating system offerings to include the UNIX operating system. Once again, the customer had a wider choice of systems while preserving the complete portability of his applications and data files. 1992 Our ICHost product was so successful as an ICOBOL replacement, that Data General approached Envyr/Egan Systems to take over the development of their product. So, we made an agreement with them to acquire Interactive COBOL and merge it with our ICHost product. 1994 -- ICOBOL 2 After an extended development period, the new product was released and became known as ICOBOL 2. It was available on MS-DOS, AOS/VS, DG/UX, and various other UNIX offerings. ICOBOL 2 introduced several new features from the DG lineage to our customers, and introduced our many innovations to the remaining Data General customers. The expanded operating system offerings provided additional options to both customer bases. 1995 Hot on the heels of our success with ICOBOL 2, we next developed and delivered a replacement for Data General's AOS/VS COBOL (or 32-bit COBOL as it was sometimes called). This product was shipped as VX/COBOL and incorporated a redesigned meta-code that was capable of handl